The Table

Setting the Table vs. Making Room

I've been building community my whole adult life. Table setter. That's how I think of myself. It's how Khaled Nassra thinks of himself too, and it's one of the reasons our conversations always go a little longer than planned.

But in the middle of our Coffey Talk episode together, he said something that stopped me cold.

He talked about learning, over years of leading teams, traveling, and arriving in new places over and over again, that he had a habit of setting the table in a way that worked for him. That felt welcoming to him. That made sense through his lens. And only slowly did he start asking whether the table he was setting actually had room for everyone he was trying to welcome in.

I said it out loud on the recording: that was a mentor moment. Because I recognized myself in it immediately.

The Difference Between Open and Accessible

There's a version of community building that's really just hospitality on your own terms. You open the door. You make it warm inside. You genuinely want people to come in. But you haven't thought hard enough about who might be standing outside looking at that door and deciding it's not for them.

Khaled gave a real example. At a conference, he was responsible for session selection. He chose based on merit, value, and what he thought would resonate. And then Emma, his wife, pointed out that not a single session all day was led by a woman.

He wasn't being exclusionary. He was being human. We all default to what's familiar. We all have shortcuts. The question is whether we're willing to slow down long enough to notice where those shortcuts are taking us.

I Didn't Notice Either

Here's the part I keep sitting with. I was at that same event. And I didn't notice.

I said that on the recording too, and I meant it as an honest admission, not a performance of humility. I've been so deep in conversations with women in this community about the spaces they're stepping into and the change that's coming that I think I stopped looking at the room and started looking at the horizon. Which is its own kind of blind spot.

Seeing change on the way is not the same thing as doing the work of making room right now.

The Chameleon Problem

Khaled grew up moving between different communities, different families, different belief systems. He learned early on how to show different parts of himself depending on who was in the room. He called it a coping mechanism. And it was, for a while.

But at some point, the chameleon in you has to figure out which parts of yourself you're willing to hold onto no matter what. Because if you keep shifting to match the room, you stop being someone who's welcoming others and start being someone who's just reflecting them back at themselves. That's not community. That's a mirror.

The work, for him and honestly for me, is learning to stay anchored in yourself while genuinely making room for people who don't look or sound or move through the world the way you do. Those two things have to coexist.

What I'm Carrying Forward

I've been thinking about what it means to build something that genuinely leaves room for everyone, not just for those who fit comfortably into the vision I already have.

Khaled said it directly: sometimes an open door isn't enough. Sometimes you have to go out and pull people in. Not tokenize them, not add them as an afterthought, but actually think about what made it hard for them to walk through the door in the first place and address that.

That's harder than setting a beautiful table. It requires you to look at your own table first and ask who's missing from it. And then sit with the answer long enough to do something about it.

I don't have a tidy conclusion here. That's kind of the point. The best conversations don't wrap up. They crack something open and leave you with work to do.

Go listen to this one. Khaled has a lot to say.

You can find this episode here.