Maryam Banikarim built a community around a simple idea: belonging isn't something you give people. It's something you give them the power to create.
Banikarim, a longtime marketer turned founder, wants to set a dinner table across the Brooklyn Bridge. An actual table, with strangers eating at it, stretched across a body of water she'd like to connect people over, both literally and figuratively.
The Longest Table started in 2022, when Banikarim saw a photo of an iftar in Egypt — one long table running down a street. She posted it to her Chelsea ‘Nextdoor’ app and asked, “what if we did that?” Eight neighbors said yes, so she and co-founder Andy Lerner rented tables and chairs. The invitation was simple: we'll bring the tables and chairs, you bring friends and food.
Five hundred people came. Then 700. Then 1,000. This past year, more than 2,000. Fifty other tables have popped up around the country, run by people she's never met. This year, 600 people wrote in wanting to host their own.
Despite this, Banikarim has deliberately resisted turning The Longest Table into a bigger business.
Banikarim spent 25 years as a C-suite marketer at Hyatt, Nextdoor, Gannett, Univision, and NBCUniversal. She chairs the WSJ CMO Council. Nobody has to explain growth models to her. She knows exactly what commercializing this could be worth.
She could own the expansion. Instead, she gives it away, because the 50 tables aren't hers. They're other people's, built from a toolkit she created.
The Case For Measuring Less
For the first year, Banikarim didn't measure much. As she puts it, they weren't focused on measuring it. They were focused on making it happen. Only after 500 people showed up did the commercial instinct kick back in, and even then, the whole apparatus is a pre- and post-survey with roughly four metrics.
What those four metrics showcase is a leadership lesson everyone should steal: three years running, eight out of ten attendees meet someone new, feel less lonely, feel a sense of belonging, and feel better about where they live — which then makes them want to participate in their neighborhood.
Belonging isn't the outcome. Participation is.
People don't just attend. They bring friends. They host their own tables. They invite other people into the experience.
The thing she created has become something other people feel ownership over. And that's where the lesson gets interesting for leaders.
What This Means in Business
Two years ago, Banikarim was leading Fortune's Most Powerful Women, which brings together influential women across the business landscape. Five hundred executives gathered for a conference dinner, and she turned it into a version of The Longest Table.
Each table had an ambassador, pulled aside in advance and briefed on a single responsibility: walk arrivals down the table, introduce them, and make sure nobody has what she calls the awkward middle-school moment of standing there unsure if there's a seat for them.
An explicit assignment that no one stands alone.
The same principle applies to how Banikarim thinks about participation.
Volunteers show up and don't always do it her way. She’s learned that’s a feature, not a bug.
When people have real agency over how something happens, she believes, they care more about how it turns out.
That's a lesson many organizations still struggle with; employees are often treated as the audience for culture. The offsite is created for them. The ERG calendar is handed to them. The company's values are communicated to them.
Then leadership wonders why participation is low. Maybe the problem isn't that people don't want to participate. Maybe we've given them too little ownership over what they're being asked to participate in.
The Longest Table works because Banikarim doesn't need to be at every table. She just needed to make the first one worth pulling up a chair for.
And then she gave everyone else permission to set their own.
