The Bread Breakers

The Bread Breakers is a monthly interfaith community dinner in Boston, that started with its roots in Jewish traditions like Shabbat and Havdalah. People of every background gather to cook, eat, sing, learn, and connect. Two-thirds of the participants don't identify as Jewish. That’s the whole point.

When Interfaith America awarded a grant to build the Bread Breakers a virtual home, we quickly realized that a website alone wouldn’t cut it. Before we could tell their story online, the community needed to define its story — its mission, its vision, its goals, and the voices of the people who show up every month.

So a website project became a 12-month community design process. Working with community leader Matt Segil and members of the Bread Breakers community, we co-created a vision and mission statement, defined core community actions and goals, wrote the founding story, built a community leader directory with personal bios, and trained Matt in human-centered design so he could keep building on his own. We also developed brand guidelines and trained Matt in Webflow so the community owns its digital presence permanently.

Then we designed and launched BreadBreakers.org — not as a brochure, but as a living space that reflects who the community actually is.

The result is a community that knows what it stands for and can articulate it to anyone who walks through the door. New members arrive to a site that says exactly what to expect. Leaders have their stories published. And the whole thing runs without us — which is how we know it worked.

What the Bread Breakers built is rare: a space where strangers become community through celebration, education, and the simple act of sharing a meal. We just helped them see it clearly enough to invite the rest of the world in.