About Us

Founder

Anjali Dalal

I didn’t set out to start a civic engagement organization. In 2022, I invited six friends over to talk about a particularly depressing Supreme Court case over wine and cheese. We sat at my kitchen table, echoing each other’s opinions, reinforcing what we already believed. Nobody left my house that night feeling any better. But it was nice to get together.

We kept it going, trying different hot button issues in the news every month. Then one evening, we tried something different. We talked about a local issue. None of us knew anything about it, so I invited a local council-person to help us grapple with it. Our conversation that evening was totally different. Everyone asking questions, wrestling with trade-offs, and respectfully disagreeing on relative importance of competing priorities. We ended that conversation feeling energized. We understood the issue better, some of us changed our initial opinion after the conversation, and others thought about how to advocate for our opinions going forward. We kept that model and over time, added more friends and neighbors into the mix. Four years later, the group is still going strong.

My experience taught me that people want to be more civically engaged, they just need a more accessible place to start. I started Salonette to give more people that place. Before Salonette, I was practicing lawyer whose career spanned public service, private practice, and non-profit work.