“We left Iran in 1979 in the midst of the Iranian Revolution. We moved to Paris, then Northern California. You had to sink or swim. As a way of finding belonging, I joined every school club, including bowling, which I was terrible at. I often say that New York is the city that gave me my voice. There were many different things you could try in your search to figure out what you want to be when you grew up. I thought, “Oh, I guess I should go into marketing.” It was kind of an accident. I think if you’re curious and you’re interested in people and making connections, you’re sort of a marketer by design. If we didn’t take away from Covid that we only live once, I don’t know when we’re going to get that lesson. And for us, that’s when we founded NYCNext, discovering we weren’t alone. During Covid, there was a lot of noise about New York being dead. I was the head of marketing at Nextdoor when I thought to myself, ”We need to do something.” I remember emailing a group of friends saying, I’m tired of these headlines, I’m game to get on a call, and everybody said yes. From that first call [of] 20 people, it grew into a volunteer organization of about 600 people. We quickly came up with the concept of New York being a city where the arts are the soul of our city. One of the biggest pop ups we organized was “A Moment for Broadway” and we were able to get 24 award-winning Broadway singers to sing Sunday from Sunday in the park with George. When everybody was social-distancing I noticed a neighbor putting out a foldout table and eight of them sitting. I walked over and was like, “Who are you? I need to know who you are.” Soon, we put out flyers and posters and invited neighbors to come to a potluck [aka The Longest Table]. We didn’t really know if it would work. In fact, I remember one of my neighbors rolling his eyes saying, “Nobody’s going to move their car. This is a lot of crazy.” And 500 people showed up, then the next year, 700 people. What is amazing is doing an event on an open street–it belongs to everyone, so everybody felt welcome. We’re really excited about The Longest Table on October 6th in Chelsea. Come! We always have a seat for you.” Sign up here: https://www.longesttablenyc.com 📷 : Marj Kleinman ✍ : Talia Krausz Production Coordinators: Amelia Magel, Andrea A. Resendiz Gomez