New Friendsgiving: 300 strangers share a free meal in Santa Monica
Thanksgiving is for family. Friendsgiving is for friends. We built a coalition with DoorDash to start a holiday for strangers, and 300 people showed up.
Today Buena pitched a coalition to take on loneliness, and DoorDash is at the heart of it. The idea is a new holiday for making friends with strangers. DoorDash brings the food.
Lonelier than ever
By 2021, loneliness had become a public-health story. 185 million Americans say they’re lonely. Loneliness rose 2.5 times during the pandemic, and its effects have been compared to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Many people crave real connection but don’t know where to begin. Making a new friend as an adult is awkward, and a year of distance has made it harder. It won’t fix itself once the pandemic is over.
What the brief started from
- 185MAmericans say they’re lonelyThe figure the New Friendsgiving campaign site led with.
- 2.5×rise in loneliness during the pandemicHow much loneliness grew while people were kept apart.
What gets people to talk to a stranger?
We wanted to know what it would take to move someone from unwilling to willing to strike up a conversation with a stranger, so we ran a survey. The answer was almost embarrassingly simple: a free meal.
That insight first became a pitch to DoorDash and The Deep called Deep Meals, a free dinner you could only eat with a stranger over Zoom. As the country reopens, we want to take it off the screen and into a park.
A coalition, not a campaign
A new holiday needs more than a logo, so every partner brings what it does best.
The food
DoorDash, feeding everyone who comes.
The crowd
No More Lonely Friends, the meetup community Marissa Meizz started after her viral TikTok.
The conversation
The Deep, with question games built to get strangers past small talk.
YourMomCares, a children’s mental-health nonprofit, brings its network. Buena makes the name, the brand, the website and the campaign, and pulls the partners together around one date.
What came next
DoorDash announced New Friendsgiving on November 11, 2021. Nine days later, on November 20, about 300 strangers spread out blankets for a free picnic at Ocean View Park in Santa Monica. The whole afternoon is in New Friendsgiving: 300 strangers share a free meal.
