Get Together

“The journey is not so much about how many people respond. You can just impact one person and they can impact you back.” - Bruce MucheluleWhen Bruce became a dad, he wasn’t quite sure how to know if he was doing things right. He reached out on Twitter to see if there were any support groups or places for dads to find peer mentorship. He couldn’t find one, but he did receive DMs from many fathers looking for a community like Bruce.DADing Different began as a space for young and first-time dads to exchange notes, share experiences, and support each other on their journeys. Bruce has found vulnerability to be key to meaningful sharing, and he designs the community to encourage that. Too many structures and processes can be off putting for a community. Bruce opts instead for serendipity and asynchronicity in a WhatsApp group.We talked with Bruce about creating a space that is “member-led” not “leader-led” and opting for a small group of engaged, eager members. Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:You can’t fake the funk. How Bruce started DAD-ing Different.Peer-mentorship. A space to learn together.Watering hole. WhatsApp as a home for conversation and a place to connect 1:1 with other dads.Getting started. Building confidence at the outset of organizing.

“It's way better if members are passionate and loud than dispassionate and quiet. The fact that they care enough to yell is really a gift.” - Evan HamiltonReddit is the mothership for sub-communities known as “subreddits,” each of which covers a different topic from ask historians to cats standing up. Subreddits are each managed by a team of volunteers.Thus as the Director of Community at Reddit, Evan Hamilton doesn’t have just one community to cultivate. He has hundreds of thousands of very distinct communities he’s tasked with serving. These “Redditors” have a history of being candid with their feedback. In July 2015, thousands of Reddit moderators shut down a significant portion of the site’s subreddits to collectively boycott the company. Evan has been instrumental in rebuilding and sustaining trust with volunteers in the years since.  We talked with Evan about how Reddit builds with transparency and empathy at such significant scale.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:History of Reddit. How Reddit has evolved over the years with its user base.Evan’s story as a Redditor. “Redditors relish in learning about the real world and the mundane.”The community as a stakeholder. Reddit considers thier community not just as an asset, but also stakeholders.Road show. Asking for and receiving hard feedback from the community.Community council. A close circle of 50 moderators that Reddit builds with Reddit under NDA.Scaling. Separating signals from the noise. “If you only think at scale, you will fail.”Future of Reddit. Growing the user base.

“If you're going to go to your community and build with them, realize that you're going to have to support and prop them up. It's not a part-time job. It's a full-time thing.” - Todd HansenIn the Spring of 1987, a group of music fans and journalists organized a small live event in Austin, Texas. Around 700 people showed up. By 2019, South by Southwest (SXSW) had become a 10-day conference and festival with over 28,000 attendees heading to Austin each March.Each year the conference receives 5,000+ proposals and the programs team, which Todd Hansen led, was tasked to sift through and find the 600 sessions to schedule for the final event. Though SXSW was canceled last year, that didn’t slow Todd down. He and conspirators saw their artistic friend’s opportunities disappear in the wake of the pandemics—canceled tours, exhibitions, premiers—and responded by creating the Artist Rescue Trust, which dolls out monthly $500 checks to folks who are working full time as artists. Outside of running programming at SXSW for 10 years, Todd has also run a record label, he’s the person responsible for Rich Kids of Instagram, and once owned and operated an early coach surfing website.We talked with Todd about sourcing and supercharging leads of SXSW’s session and how he recognized a need and energy to support artists through the pandemic.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:The History of SXSW. From humble beginnings of 700 attendees in 1987 to 28,000+ in 2019.Building with. How SXSW uses the PanelPicker system to co-create the content of the festival.The beginning of Artist Rescue Trust. Todd and friends came together to support artist affected by the pandemic.You can’t fake the funk. Tood’s innate feeling to share ideas.

“The question is ‘how do I keep my volunteers on track?’ because they're hugely motivated.” - David Lyford-SmithIf you spend a lot of time working with spreadsheets, you know they have a special power to rule the world. You can do almost anything with them from creating a shopping list to financial planning and analysis. Spreadsheets' powers lie in the fact they are accessible to people who aren’t programmers and coders. But if even just one cell is wrong, it can wreak terrible havoc.David Lyford-Smith works for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. In the 1990s, ICAEW started a tech faculty to serve as internal experts researching matters of technology and automation affecting accountants. In 2013, it was apparent that the excel content was the most popular, and a collective of “excel warriors” was spun up into its own community. David raised his hand to help steer the direction of the work and joined several thousands of chartered accountants and others seeking to mitigate spreadsheet risk in workplaces around the world. They’ve created accessible materials like twenty principles for good spreadsheet practice as a guide for those who use spreadsheets daily and for those without special spreadsheet skills.We talked with David about the power of spreadsheets and the way in which he is channeling the enthusiasm of excel warriors to help each other and to help the public mitigate spreadsheet risk.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:The spreadsheet ecosystem. The power of spreadsheets and use cases.Documentation. What matters most in creating spreadsheets in teams.Channeling enthusiasm. Giving volunteers direction.Defining “who.” Serving communities needs and creating resources in the public interest.Origin story. How a group of excel warriors emerged at ICAEW.Content creation. Building with volunteer members and online creators.

"We are a part of their success. We are a part of their team.” - Ashley HackworthBTS is a seven-member South Korean boy band. They became the fastest-growing group since The Beatles to earn four US number-one albums, doing so in less than two years. The rise of BTS is in part thanks to a huge leaderless web of dedicated fans who call themself A.R.M.Y. People like Ashley Hackworth host accounts that serve as informational and even emotional hubs for millions of fans. They don’t just love BTS’s music, they support each other through mental health issues and other very human challenges, many of which the band sings about in their music. They have banded together to impact the outcome of political movements (including foiling a Trump rally this summer), raised millions of dollars for the Black Lives Matter movement, and flooded social media platforms to drown out racist voices. Members feel like they are part of this big family across the world, a point that Maggie’s 14 year-old sister Mira, a BTS superfan who helped co-hosted the interview, emphasized to us.Activism is as important as the catchy tunes for Ashley, Mira and their fellow fans. Ashley manages one of the biggest UK fan accounts for BTS. Not only does she report on what's happening with the band in the region, the account also serves as a hub for worldwide BTS news and media requests, translation requests, fundraising, and more.We talked with Ashley about how fans gather to support each other in many ways without formal leadership and beyond music. Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:You can’t fake the funk. How Ashley discovered and first connected with BTS.Shared values. The music communicates values of activism and mental health awareness.Decentralized leadership. Creating a space where any fan can step up and see their ideas through.Watering hole. BTS fans gather on Twitter to connect over music and engage beyond in activism.Virtual gathering. K-pop and technology have historically been intertwined to bridge gaps across geography.

“Let's bring designers together and first talk about your wellbeing. Then let's talk about the next steps forward for you as a designer.” -  Lewis Kang'etheLewis Kang'ethe was first championed as a community leader in primary school when his teacher asked him to spearhead the mathematics club. When the teacher asks, the answer is either, “yes or yes.” Now, Lewis works as a product designer in Kenya. When he’s looking for jobs outside of Africa he often gets asked the question, “are you qualified?” Lewis started the African chapter of The Fearless Community so that designers in Africa can tell their stories. It’s a place for designers like Lewis to find work and a network. Members from around the world convene in local Slack channels and attend video podcast series with veteran designers. When COVID-19 became a threat, they launched the #StayConnected series first to talk about their wellbeing and then, the next steps forward for their members as designers. Lewis takes a “servant” leadership approach to his role as community lead in Africa. We talked with him about the attention to details when connecting people across cultures and how the community has adjusted to online meetups.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:You can’t fake the funk.Getting started. Reaching out to potential members on portfolio websites.Bridging the gap. Connecting people across cultures. Virtual meetups. Leaning into playfulness and fun of being a designer.Servant leadership. Building with and in service of the community members. 

“The email that I would receive after every single town hall was, ‘I thought I was the only one.’” - Claire WassermanBy 2016, Claire Wasserman was fed up with men not taking her seriously in the workplace. For years, she’d internalized this marginalization as somehow her fault or her problem to struggle through alone. It was time for that to change.With a friend, Claire brought together 100 women in a town-hall style event to talk about money and power in the workplace. Out of those conversations, Claire saw the potential for something much bigger.After that first town hall, she created a Slack group which grew to 6,000 women in the first year. Half a year later, that Slack group had more than 20,000 members from all 50 states. Claire quit her job, incorporated a business, and hit the road hosting town halls around the country.  Today, Ladies Get Paid has helped more than 75,000 women believe in and advocate for their worth, including a young Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Town hall discussions, conferences, workshops, webinars and more took place across the country before the pandemic, and those sessions have transformed into webinars and more since COVID arrived.How did Claire get such a massive community and business off the ground? Tune in for the full story.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Can’t fake the funk. Why this work matters to Claire.Origin story. In 2016, Claire hosted a town hall in NYC offering an intimate and vulnerable space to talk about money.Town halls. Claire’s tour across America and learning the dynamics of different cities.Moderation. Creating community guidelines and an ecosystem where there is no need for moderation.Writing the “Ladies Get Paid” book. Centering the book around stories of real women.Lawsuit. How Ladies Get Paid was sued and lobbied elected officials to change laws.

“I tell all my staff to have your hearts, your minds and your ears open to new ideas. It doesn't have to come from you to be a great idea.” - Adam BedoianMargaritaville isn’t just a state of mind, it’s a real place. Seniors can live out their Buffett-inspired retirement dreams at the three Latitude Margaritaville retirement communities in Daytona Beach and Watersound, Florida, and Hilton Head, South Carolina.When moving into a retirement community, people care greatly about what their community will be like. The Margaritaville theme communicates a clear identity of fun, food, music and escapism. The theme has resonated. People camped out overnight to be the first to secure spots the Margaritaville development in Daytona Beach.In this interview, Bailey chats with Adam Bedoian whose team is responsible for bringing the Margaritaville lifestyle to life. Each week they host 10 hours of live music, pickleball games, and a number of programs at their restaurants, fitness centers, amphitheater shell, and pool. Residents have stepped up officially and unofficially to support the community as resident advisors, hostess, and even with behind the scenes aspects of running the community, like accounting.We were delighted to see how clear Adam and his team took a “build with” approach to establishing the community at Margaritaville and hope you enjoy the story. Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:You can’t fake the funk. Adam’s early career in hospitality and transition to community-building.Prototyping Margaritaville. Running the idea by the “Parrottheads,” Jimmy Buffett’s super fans, before launching.Programs that prompt connection. Listening and having ongoing, open conversations.Managing expectations. “I can take care of everything except for who your neighbors are.”Supercharging leaders. Unofficially and officially, residents have stepped up and brought the escapism lifestyle to life.

“The strategy is the questions. You have to ask the right questions. If you don’t, you can be walking away from a smile.” - Chris TurnerWhen Chris Turner was 12 years old he got a metal detector and fell in love with looking for history. Over the years, he would be on the beach or in a park and get approached by a frantic couple looking for their ring. Within minutes, he was often able to help them recover their ring.These rings represent stories and relationships, and when they are lost, it feels as though the stories are lost with them. Chris started The Ring Finders in Vancouver to help people recover their rings and thus their stories. He documented these generous acts and caught the attention of a man in Illinois who invested in the mission.Since then, Chris has built an online directory of 500 independent metal detecting specialists in 22 countries that go out in search of rings, most of which do it on a pay as you wish basis. We talked with him about the human nature of this work and spotlighting stories from the searches.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Origin Story. Why Chris started metal detecting.Rework basis. Pay what you wish and pay it forward.Spotlighting the stories. A video blog documenting searches.Finding Jon Cryer’s ring. The stories that reveal themself after publicity.

“Society is losing something when we don’t share our weirdness with one another. You're losing something when you have someone at your table and they don't share what makes them different. One of the purposes I have in life is to create spaces where people will share what is interesting about them, and why they are different.” - Sophie Mona PagèsAs a Moroccan immigrant growing up in France, Sophie Mona Pagès grew up feeling a bit “weird” in her complex identity. She craved a space infused with diversity, inclusion, intimacy, modernity, and beauty. Instead of waiting for such a space to appear, she created LVRSNFRNDS herself. The 20 attendees at the first event in East London were people Sophia found on dating apps who she “would be happy to spend an evening with.” She asked them to fill out a form if they wanted to attend, spend 15 minutes with her on a call, and gathered fun facts about each attendee to spark conversations. The group was diverse across identities and ages, and meaningful relationships were sparked. The night was a success. Today LVRSNFRNDS gathers people around the world, to fight loneliness and enable meaningful connections of all kinds. Hand-selected members have access to events where they’re asked to contribute their voice to conversations on intimacy and relationships.In March 2020, the community traded bars for virtual rooms. We’ll talk with Sohpie about developing a playbook that captures shared values, facilitating online conversations, and why this work matters to her.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Origin story. Finding the first 20 people.Can’t fake the funk. “I grew up feeling weird.”Going virtual. People showing up and supercharging the why--support.Facilitating online. Empowering members to step up as hosts.Building playbooks with members. Acknowledging that people mess up and creating a response for when that happens.

“As the community grows and people come back, they start wanting to know more about us and where we're coming from. We wanted to make that really clear--the origin of all of these recipes and of our family.” - Sarah LeungThe Woks of Life has opened the door for many families to connect over the food and memories they love. The Leung family, Bill and Judy, and daughters Sarah and Kaitlin started the blog to document their favorite Chinese dishes and family memories in 2013. Food has been a central part of their family's heritage. Sarah’s grandpa was a chef in the New York Catskills and Sarah’s dad, Bill, worked with him in the restaurants.Today, their blog is recognized as an authority for Chinese cooking and has sparked a robust online community. They developed their beloved editorial lens by capturing sincere experiences and rich memories with food as Chinese Americans. We talk with Sarah of how her family found their voice and supercharged others to share theirs too.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Origin story. Sarah and her sister realized they weren’t eating the food of their childhood without their parents around.Role modeling conversations. Attaching memories to recipes.Spark of community. Realizing that the blog was bigger than just their family.Creating an editorial lens. Capturing the breadth of experience people have with Chinese cuisine.Responding to feedback. Keeping the blog “living and breathing” and always improving.

“Everyone has that thing that makes them super excited they can just talk endlessly about it. When you’re interviewing you're feeling around for that geyser. You don't know what's going to make them light up. As you find it, you can feel that flow and the change in their voice.” - Maggie ZhangMaggie Zhang and Bailey sit down to reflect on Maggie’s learnings so far as a “Get Together” correspondent. Maggie’s approaching her 10th episode on the podcast. She’s brought us the stories behind creative communities like Improv Everywhere, Atlas Obscura, and Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls. Her curiosity, creativity, and thoughtfulness has leveled up our podcast immensely —from how we choose guests, to how we approach our interviews and edits.Outside of the podcast, Maggie is the Design Community Manager at Spotify. She has also worked at IDEO, Substack, Daily tous le jours, and she once traveled around the world to create her own publication, Commonplays, about what makes a place creative and innovative. In this episode, you’ll learn more about Maggie and absorber reflections from helping us make the podcast.

“The hallmark of Toastmasters is making things fun because we want people to come back. We can have the best education in the world but if you're not coming back, it's of no use.” - Joe SmithToastmasters was founded on October 22, 1924 (97 years ago!) at a YMCA in Santa Monica, California by a man named Ralph Smedley.Ralph set out to offer a functional value--creating a space for members to improve their public speaking. What continues to keep people coming back decades later is the inspirational, supportive, and fun vibe of the group. Toastmasters is sustained by a vibrant group of volunteers. Today there are more than 364,000 paying members around the world, and one in three members also volunteers for the organization.Joe Smith is a longtime Toastmaster and serves as the Program Quality Director for District 38 of Toastmasters in the Philadelphia area. We talked with him about Toastmasters’ history and the magic that keeps members coming back to learn and volunteer.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Can’t fake the funk. How Joe found himself at Toastmasters.Origin story. People are afraid of public speaking--everywhere.An activity refined over years. Clubs gather around table topics and prepared speeches with clear roles.Creating leaders. “Members have reaped the benefits throughout their life and they want to pay it back,” so they step up as volunteers.World Championship of public speaking. Celebrating and expanding the pool of speaker feedback.

“We really managed to create a community of doers. Our people always look at how they can impact the world, how they can impact change.”  - Colombe Cahen-SalvadorIn 2016, Colombe, Laura, and Andrea were devastated by the UK's decision to leave the European Union. Colombe is French, and Andrea and Laura are Italian. For them, the E.U. is a symbol of a more open and global society.In response, the team completely changed their lives to organize. Colombe and Andrea started by creating Volt, a pan-European political party. They were the first to attempt and succeed in building a continent-wide political party. But in doing so they realized the biggest issues of our time weren’t just European issues, they were global issues–climate change, big tech, and the rise of fascism. Action would be meaningless unless the world bands together. Colombe, Andrea, and Laura have been working over the last year on a global campaign movement called NOW! to unite and solve shared global challenges. We talk with them about how they are developing leaders around the world and taking action together.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:What brings Colombe, Laura, and Andrea to this work. The need to bridge gaps across the continent and the shared experience of Erasmus.Shifting direction. Making the decision to redefine who their community was built with from local to global. And, inviting members from the original community to stay engaged.Forging a watering hole. A global platform to connect people with varying access to technology.Listening. Creating space to hear community and systems to reflect insights back in tools, resources, and stories.Shared activity. Bringing together volunteers, the most energized members, for weekly community chats, talking about global topics from a local perspective.Call to action. How you can get involved.

“Stop using the word community. We all know community is magical but doesn’t come together by magic. It’s magical because it’s this elusive thing. So take the ambiguity out of it. Stop using the word and get more specific.” - Kai Elmer SottoPeople & Company’s theme of our last year was to refine the process we use to teach community building. How did it go? What did we learn? What will 2021 hold?Kai, Kevin and Bailey sat down with our friend Marjorie Anderson, “Get Together” correspondent, for a no-holds-bar reflection. They dove into their coaching process, learnings with clients going virtual, and what’s ahead for 2021.Note: we had some technical difficulties and audio is not as clear as always. Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:About People & Company. Inside look into how People & Company strives to show up in the world.Personal year in review. Bailey, Kevin, and Kai reflect on big life moments in 2020.Communicating the value of community. Stop using the word "community."Looking ahead, 2021. Partnership as the north star for the work at People & Company. 

“In creating a home, I'm creating sustainability. And I'm creating excellence within the people that I'll be housing.”- Ceyenne DoroshowCeyenne Doroshow is an author, activist, and the founder and executive director of G.L.I.T.S., an organization dedicated to creating sustainable housing and healthcare for Black transgender people. Ceyenne has become “the parent that she desperately wanted as a child” for people around the world. At an early age, Ceyenne identified as transgender and faced a world lacking even the language to understand the experience of a trans person. In June 2020, Ceyenne co-organized the historic Liberation March, a Black Trans Lives Matter silent march in Brooklyn, NY. At the march, Ceyenne announced to a crowd of more than 15,000 people that G.L.I.T.S. had raised more than $1 million to secure stable housing for Black trans-New Yorkers. Through providing both education and housing, Ceyenne is empowering the next generation of Black transgender leaders. We talk with her about the structure and language she has given to the G.L.I.T.S. community at large to create more leaders.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Origin story. “Sex work, that was my platform. That's how I grew up. That's how I learned a lot about organization. But community is who I am.”First member. Alia Adams called Ceyenne from Uganda.Creating structure and vetting leaders. The application process and contract G.L.I.T.S. members enter into.Creating leaders. Creating a path for leaders to emerge in the G.L.I.T.S. house.

“You don't have to be a celebrity or a mega influencer to take action and host an event. A hundred people or a thousand people don’t have to attend. It can be five people. That impact is still impact. ” - Nicole àBeckett Just after the 2016 U.S. election, many people were saying, “I want to do more to get involved but I don’t know how.” Nicole àBeckett and her brother, David, knew there had to be a better way to bring people together for action on issues that matter. They started SameSide with a simple idea—to incorporate civic engagement within existing communities. Based in LA, Nicole worked with a local named Phil in March of 2017 to host the first event. Phil had a large network of friends and rallied them just after the Women’s March to campaign for Sarah Hernandez, a candidate for Senate in California. Together with SameSide he paired phone banking with a brewery tour. While phone banking was intimidating to some, the brewery tour with friends nudged fifteen of Phil’s buds to cross the threshold to activism. Through SameSide, this accessible activism model has been employed at scale. SameSide offers hosts the tools to learn and take action on issues. A host's job isn’t to be an expert; it’s to convene people around something they care about. The Standard Hotel is hosting pool parties advocating for gun safety.  A woman celebrating her birthday wove in efforts to support ending the rape kit backlog in California. We talked with Nicole about how she has empowered hosts with tools to gather folks around what they care about to take action.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Origin story. The beginning of integrating civic action with existing experiences and communities.Supporting leaders. How Nicole instills confidence and educates hosts on civic issues with issue baked tool kits.Ramping up the purposeful and participatory in activities. The tools Nicole offers hosts to make events action-focused.Leaders roadmap. Nicole utilized email campaigns to plant the seed for folks to take their first action and work up to hosting.

“Leadership is actually the first few followers, not the crazy first person to stand up on stage.” - Anna McAfeeIn May 2017, Anna McAfee put up a simple post on LinkedIn to see if anyone living in her hometown of Coffs Coast, Australia wanted to get together. She had just returned after years of living abroad and wanted to “get to know the people behind the profiles” in her area. Anna included the hashtag #LinkedInLocal. Fifteen people made it out to the first Coffs Coast event, but the online response was what would change Anna’s life. Three strangers—Alexandra Galviz in London, Manu Goswami in NYC, and Erik Eklund in Brussels—raised their hand to also host a #LinkedInLocal in their city. No one could predict what happened next.Host requests started pouring in from around the world. The founding team was soon hosting after-hours trainings six nights a week to help new cities ramp up. For two years, Anna and her co-creators led, mentored, and managed the #LinkedInLocal global community. At its height, #LinkedInLocal had more than 1,000 hosts and had rallied over 300,000 humans, in 650+ cities across 92 countries. Anna & co. fostered this community without formal support from LinkedIn. She walked a fine line between an unexpected, organic community and the priorities of the platform. In 2019, Anna stepped away and she recently co-authored a book about her experience: How a Hashtag Changed the World.We talked with her about creating a host community and the friction that can appear when an organic community erupts on a major platform.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Anna defines personal why. Searching for belonging in her local community, Anna used the tool she knew best--LinkedIn.Identify the “who” of #LinkedInLocal. The power of a network of hyper-local communities.Balancing inclusion and exclusion. #LinkedInLocal’s first core value: diversity.Cultivating your identity. Building an organic community within the guidelines of a major brand.Support leaders. Anna played the role of connector--making connections within the host communities, helping hosts help themself.

“We're not going to give up in-person gatherings, but at the same time, virtual tables have been so meaningful. Post-COVID probably will be a ‘both and’ community.” - Carla FernandezIn November, we hosted a live interview with Carla Fernandez and Mary Horn in front of an intimate audience. For both women, their work with The Dinner Party is personal.  “We know what it’s like to lose someone and we aren’t afraid to talk about it,” their website states.When COVID-19 arrived in March, Carla, Mary, and the team “frantically put together some programming.” They stood up a calendar of events, including yoga and journaling, that Dinner Parties could tune into from around the world. But when they turned to their community and asked, “what do you need more of?” the answer grounded them in their founding purpose. “They weren't as interested in these one-way teaching experiences,” Carla told us. “What they really wanted was connections and homies that they could talk to about what was going on in their life.” People can go to a yoga class any hour of the day, seven days a week. At the outset of COVID-19, there were a lot of organizations providing those spaces (thankfully!). What Dinner Partiers didn't have was someone that they could talk to about their grief. Since that realization, they have launched the Buddy Program, connected affinity groups, and added 70 new tables to their community.  In our live interview, we talked with them about finding an activity that was purposeful, participatory, and offered the peer support people come to The Dinner Party for. We have plans to host another live interview soon! Stay in the loop by subscribing to our newsletter.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Origin story. Why Mary comes to the table. (We first heard Carla’s back when we talked with her and co-founder, Lennon Flowers, on a previous episode of the podcast.)Listening to community needs. Asking questions that revealed next steps. Purposeful & participatory shared activity. How The Dinner Party launched the Buddy Program and transitioned the tables online. Paying attention to hand-raisers. How the team supercharged and supported affinity groups that popped up around shared experiences and identities.Looking to the future. A post-COVID world with the best of virtual and IRL gatherings.

Note: we will discuss sexual assault in this episode and advise our listeners to practice discretion in tuning in.“Everybody's story is valid. The fact that people feel they cannot speak up about their own pain is my motivator.” - Onyango OtienoAt twenty years old, Onyango Otieno was the victim of sexual assault and found he had no where to turn. In Kenya, as in many other societies, the patriarchal structure turns a blind eye to the sexual experiences of men. Men are socially conditioned to hold in their pain.   Because of his background as a storyteller, Onyango instead began writing about his experience. In sharing his story on Facebook and Twitter, he found “some kind of liberation.”Onyango continued exploring African masculinity and advocating for mental health, and eventually put up a post sharing that he was starting a WhatsApp-based mental health support group.Over 200 people raised their hands to join him there. Onyango put these folks into two groups and offered some basic community guidelines that allowed members to define the space the way they wanted. Today they call these groups Nyumbani, which is Swahili for “home.”We talked with Onyango about structuring a community support group starting with community guidelines and his personal self-care as he leads people to unpack trauma. Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Sending a signal. Onyango sent a call for men who wanted to join a support group.Watering hole. Gathering on WhatsApp and creating community guidelines.Healing circles. A participatory shared activity where men share stories of sexual assault, often for the first time.Self-care. Onyango’s practices to check in with his emotions.

“Listeners should expect refreshing and new voices from me. The plan is to put Africa on the map.” - Whitney OgutuIn the middle of July, we announced that we were searching for a new podcast correspondent to  help us expand the stories we tell. We had an incredible response to the program–117 applications! We decided in the end to bring on not just one, but two correspondents: Marjorie Anderson and Whitney Ogutu.We’ve been training Marjorie and Whitney over the past few months on our editorial voice, how to do outreach, how to interview, and to edit, and we’re excited to share that they've recorded their interviews. In advance of hearing her first episode, today we will introduce you to the cerebral, sincere, kind-hearted Whitney Ogutu who comes to us from Nairobi, Kenya. Whitney leads Community Engagement and Programs at Mettā Nairobi, a community, and innovation hub that supports startups, entrepreneurs and innovators. She is an investor in people and their potential, which she traces back to her first memories of local chamas, a Kenyan community format for brainstorming and taking actions on local problems.Over the next few months, Whitney will be sharing stories of community leaders on the podcast but first we wanted to share hers. 

"I kept doing events after that first one. I guess that became my community. Even now saying it out loud, it is very strange. I never thought I could be someone that would be a part of like creating a community.” - Jodianne BeckfordJodianne created Noire Girls Plant, “from a dark place of feeling numb.” At a low point, she found plants were givinging her joy. She searched on Eventbrite and asked around, trying to find a space with others to nerd out and talk about plants with.When she couldn’t find the space she craved, she decided to create it herself. She stood up an event and designed it with all the elements she would have wanted--yoga, spoken word, meditation, a plant gift and goodie bag. People left that first event with more than just goodie bags and time well spent. Attendees both had fun and saw each other, as people of color, being vulnerable. They asked, “when’s the next one?” and so Noire Girls Plants began--a community of growers, in aspects of health, prosperity and nature.We talked with Jodianne about how she created her first event to explore her interests with others and what keeps her going through hard times.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Origin story. How Jodianne found and gathered people around the healing power of plants.The first event. Designing for the event for your first member--you.Language. Jodianne’s use of nature as a metaphor for mental health.Going virtual. Hikes, Mother’s Day virtual potting events, and shared activities at a social distance.Dealing with adversity.  Jodianne keeps showing up to do this work for “the little me,” to show her she doesn’t listen to the “no” voices in her head.

“Community doesn't require that you have the same opinions. It just requires that you share a passion.” - Marjorie Anderson In the middle of July, we announced that we were searching for a new podcast correspondent to  help us expand the stories we tell. We had an incredible response to the program–117 applications! We decided in the end to bring on not just one, but two correspondents: Marjorie Anderson and Whitney Ogutu.We’ve been training Marjorie and Whitney over the past few months on our editorial voice, how to do outreach, how to interview, and to edit, and we’re excited to share that they've recorded their interviews. In advance of hearing her first episode, today we will introduce you to the playful, diligent, sunshine-energied Marjorie Anderson. By day she leads the community at Project Management Institute. In the evenings, she runs her own community and blog, Community by Association. Marjorie, in her words, “makes a great dinner party host but a terrible dinner party guest.” While  an introvert, Marjorie is an orchestrator of connection with a gift for bringing people together.

“There's strategic value in giving up some control when you're a leader at a company and you want new ideas to emerge.” - Steve GarguiloEarly in his career, Steve did the (seemingly) impossible—he led a grassroots transformation of the culture of Johnson & Johnson, the fifth largest company in the world. Frustrated by the pace and challenges of big company culture, Steve decided to do something he’d done in college: host a TEDx.  He hosted a casual TEDx event at a bar and invited employees within Johnson & Johnson to share their research, wild ideas, and learn from one another. Within an hour and a half of posting the event internally, 90 people had signed up. Soon employees at other offices around the world wanted to host their own. By the time Steve was done, 23,000 people at Johnson & Johnson had engaged in a TEDx and he had a new title: “Head of Instigation at Johnson & Johnson.”Today Steve continues this work shifting big company cultures from the ground up. As a partner at Cultivate, he’s taking the transformative work he did at Johnson & Johnson to other organizations. He co-authored Surge: Your Guide to Put Any Idea into Action which captures the two-decade on the quest to find better ways to take action on our ideas.We talk with Steve about how he pinpointed fellow changemakers within Johnson & Johnson and supercharged their ideas using the TEDx format. Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Start with “why.” Aligning behind a shared purpose.Do something together. The steps Steve took to host the first TEDx at J&J.Metrics of success. Shiny eyes and goosebump moments.Pinpointing cultivators. Finding other people that have energy to spark change.Leading authentically. Being the person that you want more of in the world.

The Dinner Party is a worldwide community of 20- and 30-somethings who have each experienced the loss of a loved one. “We know what it’s like to lose someone and we aren’t afraid to talk about it,” their website states.Before the pandemic more than 400 Dinner Party tables were regularly meeting in nearly 100 cities around the world. Carla and Lennon share in this episode how they have through the age old practice of breaking bread, Dinner Partiers are transforming life after loss from an isolating experience into one marked by community support, candid conversation, and forward movement.When COVID-19 arrived in March, in-person dinner parties were no longer an option and the organization made a shift to video calls. Since then, they have added 70 new tables and launched a buddy program.You're invited!On Friday November 20, 2020 Bailey and Kevin of People & Company host a live interview with Carla Fernandez, co-founder, and Mary Horn, community manager, at The Dinner Party to learn about how the community has transformed since the pandemic. Grab a ticket

“If there's drama in your life, you don't want to talk about it. It’s hush, hush. But that's not the way you heal. It's been detrimental to our communities. So when people–especially a lot of black women—saw that representation on camera it just touched them in a way that just exploded.” - Kibi AndersonMany of us may know “Red Table Talk” as the TV show that Jada Smith, her daughter Willow, and mother Adrienne host. What you may not know is that Red Table Talk sparked thriving grassroots communities of viewers. Women in cities around the world started their own “Red Table Talks”—literally dressing their own tables with red tablecloths and gathering with strangers to experience the honest conversations that the Smiths role model on the show for themselves. Kibi Anderson is an award-winning Emmy producer and the former president of Red Table Talk. She was first a fan, drawn in by the raw conversations. We talk with her about the grassroots community that formed around the show and how she used her business savvy and inherent passion for community building to supercharge their efforts.Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Can’t fake the funk. Kibi’s shares how she grew up in community.Role modeling difficult conversations. How Red Table Talk maintains the integrity of initial conversation.Supporting an existing community. How Kibi and her team acknowledged, supported, and supercharged the leaders of their community.Building with. Experimenting on then launching new tools and content with your community members.Celebrating. Bringing “OG” members close to the RTT team and creating private, special content for their most passionate members.Hurdles. The challenges of not owning a channel (Facebook) and thus not being able to communicate seamlessly with the community.

“You don't have to have any talent. You just have to come out. I design things that would work for someone who was a lawyer or a school teacher.” - Charlie ToddIn August 2001, Charlie Todd moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy. He didn’t have immediate access to a stage, so he started creating in public spaces by staging undercover performances. Charlie documented his first undercover performances on a blog he called Improv Everywhere. Over the past two decades, Charlie has staged hundreds of “missions” involving tens of thousands of undercover performers and shared them on YouTube, garnering millions of views. Highlights include making time stop at Grand Central Terminal, a mass no-pants subway ride, and letting random strangers conduct a world class orchestra in the middle of Manhattan. Do yourself a favor, check out their YouTube.These pranks are not traditional improv. They require significant logistical work on Charlie’s end. He creates the "sandbox" for participants—first friends from his early comedy career in NYC and now thousands of people who have signed up for the Improv Everywhere mailing list—to play in, exercising their own creativity. We talked with Charlie about crowdsourcing the creativity of strangers to create in his words “a happy mob.” Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:Commanding attention. In comedy, it’s easy to get a laugh out of negative material, pointing the finger at a victim. Charlie does the extraordinary to live out the golden rule, “anything you perform should be something you want people to do to you.”The “why” for participants. In it for the fun of it.Crowd control. Managing an email list of thousands and knowing how many people to tap at one time.Power of YouTube. How YouTube created global reach for Improv Everywhere connecting them with new performers and opportunities.The “why” of the leader. How Charlie’s motivations have shifted over the past 19 years.Space. Public space as the key element to the Improv Everywhere experience.

You can tune into the original episode on the Masters of Community podcast.Special thanks to David and his team for giving us access to the audio to share directly with our listeners. Check out their podcasts!

In this behind-the-scenes interview, Dee Reddy of Intercom asks Bailey why the team at People & Company focuses on communities and how the teams has shifted coaching organizations to harness the power of community in a time of pandemic. You can tune into the original episode on Intercom's website.Some key insights that Intercom noted:There’s a lot businesses can learn about community from grassroots organizations. Many of these have, for a long time, operated remotely in innovative ways.A key strategy for nurturing a community is to build with people, not for them. Bailey spoke about this in her original conversation with me.As people around the world get to grips with not gathering in large groups, the online world offers an opportunity to bridge geographical distance.Digital first companies and teams are in a really good position to get creative about fostering community online, whether it’s with clients, colleagues, or family.If you’re a leader, ask yourself what has changed with what people are coming to you for. Consider those shared activities or things that you may have done in person, and try to design experiences for those people in an online capacity.Special thanks to Intercom for giving us access to the audio to share directly with our listeners. Check out their podcasts!You can subscribe on iTunes, stream on Spotify or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice.

“It's not that introverts don't want to talk to people. They really value quality conversation over talking to big quantities of people. [Silent Book Clubs] appeal because you can get that little bit of conversation about something that you're interested in. You don't have to come up with small talk. That appeals to the type of person that appreciates that mix, and I think most people are kind of ambiverts.” - Laura Gluhanich Laura Gluhanich and Guinevere de la Mare are the type of people who always had a book in hand and enjoyed reading in public spaces. But they shared a mutual frustration for the traditional book club. These sessions were often hard to schedule, and many times required reading a book that wasn’t of interest.  So to satisfy their desire for social reading, they got creative. They transformed frequent dinner outings in their San Francisco neighborhood into a shared time for quiet reading. They called their rendez-vous a “Silent Book Club”and it became a ritual for the two friends. Soon, other friends started to tag along and they began formalizing the invitations with Facebook events. Then came a series of infection points–people reaching out in Alabama, Japan, Serbia, Italy, the UK and more to start their own Silent Book Clubs, features in NPR and Oprah magazine—that brought them to 220+ chapters today.Our correspondent Mia Quagliarello talks with Laura about how she and Guinevere learned from their careers in online community building to make an assertive stand with their community guidelines. She talks about how they, as a team, have documented dream partners, personal values and deal-breakers, that have served as an underlying shared basis for decision making. Together they have continued the Silent Book Club as a global passion project with the support of volunteer hosts on the side of day jobs, Laura as the Director of Programs at Him For Her, a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on the corporate board, and Guinevere de la Mare as a UX Writer at Google. Find more stories from community leaders who are passing the torch and supercharging their leaders.

“I always believe that when you present yourself in that deeply vulnerable, authentic, personal place, almost always people meet you there.” - Pei-Ru Ko When Pei-Ru Ko was recovering from an autoimmune condition, she spent a lot of time at farmers markets in the Bay Area and grew close to local food producers. Relishing the relationships she built with them, she saw the opportunity to bridge a gap between food producers, sometimes lonely from their isolating work, and eaters, like herself, who wanted to trust and better understand the food system.In summer 2014, she hosted a night rich in food and stories, packing 45 guests into her living room to learn about sustainable seafood. Since then, the community has grown to thousands of people attending their events and listening to their stories over the years. This year, Pei-Ru passed the torch to Jovida Ross as the new executive director. Together, they are elevating stories from the entire food chain and reweaving connections in the food system.In this episode, Pei-Ru and Jovida share the power of storytelling to bring people together, how to create a space for generous listening, and why food plays an important role in building a community. Hear more from other community leaders about stage 3 in getting your people together,

The excerpt below was originally sent out via our Get Together newsletter. You see the original post here, and sign up to receive the newsletter going forward here.Our small team is working on what long term changes we make to take a more anti-racist stance and start dismantling white supremacy that we have been complicit with in the past. Below are a few immediate People & Company commitments and asks where you can plug in. (And, at the very bottom of this email we’ve included a shortlist of resources and opportunities to support the Black Lives Matter movement.)1. Refocus our office hoursWe’ve set aside 5 office hours per week, every week, over the next quarter for current and aspiring Black leaders to talk through community projects (of any type) as well as non-Black leaders to strategize around bringing people together to combat racism (in small and big ways). If this is you, contact us here.Note: We have a backlog of office hour requests. If you already applied and haven’t heard back, we’ll review shortly and prioritize office hours with folks who fit this criteria.  2. Shift who we interview on our PodcastSo far ~13% of interviewees on the Get Together podcast have been Black leaders. Shout out to these inspiring friends

“This is about everyday people coming together with their friends, with their families, with their community, with their colleagues and saying that they have a voice and that they want to use it in a constructive and powerful way in their communities. It just happens to be that we're dealing in philanthropy.” - Joelle BermanIn this episode, we sit down with two bad**s women for a conversation on the joy and challenges of giving circles–how to get one started, how to reach a consensus as a group, and how to celebrate along the way.In 2015, LiJia Gong attended marches and supported the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She felt inspired to do more. So she and three friends started gathering, exploring how they might use the bonds of their friendship and shared values to reduce inequality. Their giving circle "Radfund" was born from these conversations. The friends pledged to pool 1% of their annual income and 0.1% of their wealth annually to support organizers in NYC doing the work to challenge structural inequality and  fight for racial and economic justice.  In this episode, LiJia will share  stories and insights she’s learned from building a "political home" for herself and her friends. Joelle Berman was recently the founding Executive Director of Amplifier, a global network of 125+ giving circles inspired by Jewish values. From that position supporting so many different giving circles, she had a rare view of the ecosystem as a whole, and was able to pinpoint trends and best practices. (Shout out to Amplifier's founder, Felicia Herman, and Amplifier's current CEO, Liz Fisher, for their work continuing to spread the power of collective giving!)From their respective experiences as giving circle practitioners and experts, Joelle and LiJia will share how to build a political home and community around the shared activity of giving. Hear more from other community leaders about stage 1 in getting your people together,

“Meet people where they are, not where you wish them to be.” - Kuik Shiao-YinKuik Shiao-Yin has been called “the Singaporean voice of youth.” While serving two stints as a nominated Parliamentarian, Shiao-Yin delivered clear, passionate speeches that went viral. Beyond her work in government, she has committed herself to developing the "social and emotional capital" of the young nation. Shiao-Yin co-founded The Thought Collective, a group of social businesses including the School of Thought and Common Ground, a coworking and event space. These spaces are designed to equip more Singaporeans with the social and emotional skills they need to create the cultural change *they* want to see.  In this episode we discuss weaving the fabric of the young nation-state together at the grassroots and governmental level. Shiao-Yin shares her opinion that every successful community starts with leadership that has cognitive clarity and then remains vested in getting clearer and clearer. Shaio-Yin poses questions to other community leaders like, “What is it that you want?” “Who is this for?” “Who do you want to be?” “Who do you want others to be?”We believe nearly every challenge of building a community can be met by asking yourself, “How do I achieve this by working *with* my people, not doing it *for* them?” Shaio-Yin offers clarity of thought and kindness, and exemplifies what it means to “build with.” To hear more from other community leaders on “building with” at Stage 1 in getting your people together,

“Treat people like they're part of the brand, because they are the brand.” - Aundy CrenshawWhere do you find the funkiest, dirtiest, most addictive house music around? Look no further than Dirtybird Records.  Aundy Crenshaw and her husband, Barclay Macbride Crenshaw (better known as DJ Claude VonStroke), have translated this style and sound into a community vibe that comes alive at their events. Together, they have gathered a group of artists that feel like family and fans that are their greatest advocates. In this episode, Aundy and our "Get Together" Correspondent Mia Quagliarello start at the roots of Dirtybird Records and move into the new challenges they face today in keeping their community banded together while apart. The ethos at Dirtybird has always been to “treat people like they're part of the brand, because they are the brand.”Aundy and the small but mighty team at Dirtybird are a testament to the fact you can’t fake the funk. When you pinpoint your people, genuine passion attracts passionate people. Hear more from other community leaders about stage 1 in getting your people together,

If you're passionate about how the world builds meaningful communities, you likely know Casper ter Kuile. After an early career in grassroots climate organizing, Casper earned masters degrees in Divinity and Public Policy from Harvard. While there, he started a reading community around the Harry Potter texts, that has grown to more than 70 chapters and millions of podcast listeners around the world. Casper is also co-author of the How We Gather report, a cultural map of Millennial communities, and now a brand new book: The Power of Ritual, which is available for pre-order and will publish on June 23, 2020. In this episode, we go deep on two things Casper knows a lot about: rituals and communal reading. As Casper says, “ritual makes things real,” taking what’s invisible and making it visible, tangible to us. Casper has honed the craft of cultivating a community’s identity through ritual. Established rituals have the power to connect new community members to others who came before them. That will help your community stick together as it evolves. Hear more from other community leaders about stage 2 in getting your people together,

Tim Courtney was a key part of a monumental shift at LEGO. For seven years, Tim was the steward behind LEGO IDEAS, a crowdsourcing platform that allows superfans to submit and vote on new ideas they want LEGO to bring to market. If you've ever played with a Minecraft LEGO set, a Big Bang-themed kit, or a collection of women of NASA, you have the LEGO IDEAS community to thank. Today the LEGO community has grown from a 20,000-person test group in Japan to a global community  numbering in the millions. Tim, a lifelong lego enthusiast, was the connective tissue between these superfans submitting ideas and the business and design teams at LEGO HQ in Denmark. We'll ask Tim about his experience creating a platform that allows so many people to submit and engage with ideas for the biggest toy company on planet earth. Tim will also share about the perspective shift at the company, and setting new standards for how they talk about customers and make decisions. Transitioning to see the collaborative potential in your customers or fans or community members is hard for any community leader, especially those in a company structure, and sometimes it takes a big project make the case for such a transition. If you want to get to know Tim or hire him, check out his website www.timcourtney.netGrab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we're interviewing Dr. Gbemisola Boyede, the founder of "Ask The Paediatricians," an online medical education community that can offer all of us some much-needed inspiration in the time of COVID-19.In Dr. Gbemi's home country of Nigeria, the child mortality rates are high. But what causes these deaths isn't a lack of cost-effective treatments for common diseases. It's a geographic and information gap between parents and practitioners that leaves many parents uninformed and without access to experts who can treat their children.Dr. Gbemi saw this problem manifesting online. When everyday people offered up false remedies for each others kids, she'd find herself  intervening. Playing whack-a-mole with each of these threads wasn't going to work, so she opened the ‘Ask The Paediatricians’ Facebook group. Its mission is to educate regular parents by giving them direct access to medical practitioners.The group grew quickly and organically. Today there are more than 2,000 medical professionals who login to help more than 580,000 parents with their medical questions. Dr. Gbemi has also expanded the groups reach to Nigeria's most impoverished people–parents without access to phones or the internet—through offline work that brings volunteers to under-resourced regions around the country.What stuck out to us about our conversation with Dr. Gbemi was how natural her community-building instincts were. We like to say that no matter if your community gathers online or off, the secret to community building isn't about management, it's about creating leaders. Dr. Gbemi has done that at every stage of her journey, giving volunteer moderators tools, bringing other doctors in to do webinars instead of just leading them herself, and giving people all sorts of roles and ways to plug into the mission in their local areas.If you want to get involved with Ask The Paediatricians, you can find their group on Facebook or head to askthepaediatricians.comGrab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

In the time of Coronavirus and self-isolation, how do we find meaningful community online?We checkin today with Carly Ayres of the Slack group "100s Under 100," and revisit our stellar conversation with her from almost a year ago. //If you're on the internet or if you're working in design today, you may have heard of Carly Ayres (@carlyayres). She's full of personality, sharp ideas, and has an alluring rebellious vibe. Carly's designs are not of the polished, precious, or minimalist ilk we've become accustomed to. Her work is interactive, it's dynamic, and it's sincere. If you want proof, visit her website CarlyAyres.com. It is a Google Doc. Almost five years ago, Carly started a community in Slack called "100s Under 100," a play on the Forbes "30 Under 30" list and other similar awards. The Slack group brings together a vetted collection of designers, everyone from senior creative leads at big companies like Dropbox to high school students looking for feedback on their college applications. "Hundos" feel they are on the same team, sharing resources, insights, and feedback in what can otherwise be an isolating profession. (Full disclosure: Kevin Huynh, my partner in People & Company, is a "Hundo.")We wanted to ask Carly about this special Slack group because we get questions about community "watering holes" all the time. People want to know what platform they should use to bring their people together online. Or what they can do to actually make a digital space engaging. Carly has figured all of this out and more.How did Carly pull it off? We sat down with Carly to learn more.

In each episode of this podcast we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to hundreds more members?Today we're interviewing Kelsa Trom, the Head of Programming at NEW INC.NEW INC is the first museum-led "cultural incubator." The New Museum here in New York City opened the program in 2013 as a home artists, activists, futurists and technologists. These multidisciplinary people come together for one year to create, pushing forward everything from new businesses, to ambitious art installations, to provocative experiments in science and urban design.In its sixth year, NEW INC has over 100 creative entrepreneurs as members, with 175 mentors supporting them and 350 alumni. And we love this stat: they are 50% female and 49% POC.In this episode, we ask Kelsa about the work she and her team prioritize to bind and support the members in the space.If you want to get involved with the NEW INC program, whether its by applying to be a member or a mentor, you can find all that information at newinc.org. They’re also on socials at @newincGrab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

In each episode of this podcast we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to hundreds more members?Today we’re talking to Nitika Chopra, organizer of Chronicon, a conference that brings together hundreds of people with chronic illnesses.Nitika has been living with severe psoriasis since age 10 and was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis at age 19, which made it difficult for her to walk.That personal experience led her later in life to speak openly about what she's been through. Nitika hosted events for people with chronic illnesses, forged a Facebook group, and last year brought people together in person for Chronicon, a one-day gathering in New York City.Chances are you have a friend, family member or colleague who is struggling with a chronic illness, and you might even be dealing with one yourself. Studies show that 45% of the United States population has at least one chronic illness today, and the rates are expected to rise to 49% by 2030. At Chronicon, Nitika and her team designed an event especially for those who fit in this category,  celebrating "all they have been through and how they have learned to thrive in their lives."In this interview, we'll learn more about Nitika's journey and how she went about designing the specifics of Chronicon–from the space to food—to make sure folks with chronic illnesses felt honored.For more from Nitika and Chronicon, head to: www.chronicon.conitikachopra.cominstagram.com/nitikachopra/ Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

In each episode of this podcast we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to hundreds more members?Today we’re talking to Scott Amenta, co-founder of the COS Tech Network, a community of people working as Chiefs of Staff in companies around the world.The COS Tech Network started in 2016 when Scott found himself as a Chief of Staff, a role that quite is new in techland, and, for Scott, felt somewhat undefined. He decided to seek out other Chiefs of Staff so he could learn tips and tricks, and also get inspired about career trajectories the role could lead to.COS can be a lonely position, an ambiguous one. Scott had the intuition that others were tossing the same questions around in their head and he did something about it. A Medium post call out led to a dinner, a dinner led to a slack group, and the slack group has led to chapters around the world and a wealth of insights and resources. Recently, they even found their community covered by The New York Times.Tune in to learn more about how Scott got COS Tech Network off the ground, and what tools the extremely organized group uses to communicate, collaborate, and connect.---For more from Scott and COS Tech Network, head to: costechnetwork.comscottamenta.commedium.com/cos-tech-forumGrab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we’re talking to Erin Wayne, or @Aureylian as she’s known on the internet. Six years ago, Erin was brought on as the first pure community hire at Twitch, a company that we cite often and respect for how transparent and collaborative they are with their community. If you know Twitch, you’re likely obsessed with it. The statistics are bonkers. More than a million people are on the site at any given moment! But if you don’t know Twitch, here’s the deal: Twitch is a platform that allows people to stream their lives. Twitch started as a place where people played video games while other enthusiasts watched along, but today has evolved to much more and Erin has been a part of broadening our perception of what we go to Twitch for. We’ll dig into the story of how Erin came to work at twitch, her early efforts there, and two remarkable community programs she’s led: Twitch ambassadors and meetups. You can find Erin on Twitch and Twitter @Aureylian.Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we’re talking to Catt Small, a product designer, game maker, developer and–most importantly for today’s podcast–one of the organizers of the Game Developers of Color Expo (GDOC).GDOC is an annual event that aims to create a new normal in games by putting creators of color at the forefront–showing off their projects, holding space for new conversations, and pushing games forward as an artform. This year, GDOC held their fourth event, which was hosted at the historic at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. More than 700 people rolled out, some flying from lands as far away as Australia, to attend talks and share the games they’ve been working on with each other inside a 3-story arcade.On the podcast we’ll hear more from Catt about why she and her collaborators started GDOC in the first place AND she’ll share her secrets about how they’ve been successful with finding sponsors.If you want to get involved with GDOC, go to their website: gamedevsofcolorexpo.com. You can find Catt on twitter @cattsmall.Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

We're interrupting our regular broadcast for a holiday spectacular! We'll get zany and share some behind-the-scenes snapshots from how our business (People & Company) has grown and changed this last year. //To learn more about our company, head to https://people-and.com/Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we’re talking to Lennon Flowers and Carla Fernandez, co-founders of The Dinner Party, a worldwide community of 20- and 30-somethings who have each experienced the loss of a loved one.Using the age old practice of breaking bread, Dinner Partiers are transforming life after loss from an isolating experience into one marked by community support, candid conversation, and forward movement.Today, The Dinner Party tables are regularly meeting in nearly 100 cities around the world, from Milwaukee to Tel Aviv. Most of their 275 tables gather at a host’s house over a potluck. To attend, everyone involved must fill out an application, which the team at HQ reviews by hand, carefully matching each person to a table near them.The Dinner Party is not about one-off dinners. These tables of 10-15 people meet every couple months, so the attendees build meaningful connection over time. If you want to get involved with The Dinner Party, maybe attending, donating, or volunteering, go to their website:  https://www.thedinnerparty.org/.Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we’re talking to Jay Herratti, the Executive Director of TEDx.TEDx began as an experiment. Ten years ago, Chris Anderson, the CEO of TED, made a big decision. He took all the videos from the exclusive, private TED conference and put them up online for free. That decision had huge consequences for TED, and Chris recalls from that moment, TED “became obsessed with this idea of radical openness, of giving everything away for free. That led to us giving away the TED brand itself, in the form of the TEDx conferences, a couple of years later.”People wanted to co-create with TED, not just sit back and listen in the audience. And TED gave them the chance with TEDx, volunteer hosted events of TED like talks that happen in communities around the world.The first TEDx conference was hosted at USC in March of 2009. Today, there are more than 3,000 TEDx licensees in 170 different countries. They put on 4,000+ TEDx events each year, which are attended by 600,000 people. More than 22,000 TEDx talks have been put on stage and recorded. Each year, those talks are viewed on the TED website more than 1 billion times!In our interview, we talk to Jay about the origin of TEDx and how the organization has evolved the support it offers TEDx organizers over the last 10 years.If you want to get involved with TEDx, head over to TED.com. You can also follow TEDx on Instagram at @tedx_official.Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we’re talking to Rafe Offer, CEO of Sofar Sounds (Sofar is an acronym for "Songs from a Room"), a community-led global movement that’s bringing the magic back to live music. Dissatisfied with a concert-going experience in 2009, Rafe and two friends decided to take action. They hosted an intimate concert in a flat in North London for eight people. At the event, music was the undeniable focus: "At our gigs you could hear the music rather than the clatter of drinks being served, the purring of phones or murmur of side-bar conversations." Three living-room concerts later, there were lines around the block of people hoping to attend. Soon, people living in other countries raised their hands to bring the format to their cities. Ten years later, there are 500 gigs per month in more than 300 cities worldwide, and more than 25,000 performers have put on Sofar shows - including big names from Leon Bridges and Billie Eilish to Benjamin Clementine and Karen O.In our interview, we talk to Rafe about the origin of Sofar and how community members around the world host these gigs, and how Sofar went from hobby to a full-fledged business. If you want to get involved with Sofar, maybe attending or helping to bring an event to your city, go to their website sofarsounds.com or check out videos from concerts on their YouTube channel.Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we’re talking to Camille Ricketts (@camillericketts), the superstar Head of Marketing for Notion.If you know what Notion is, you are likely obsessed with it.But if you don’t, here’s our best shot at explaining the software: Notion is an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, project management and task management. Most importantly, Notion is modular. People can remix and reuse the templates they offer to create their own powerful tools. That’s where the community comes in.Kev, Kai and I all have roots in the Bay Area, and when we rub elbows with folks in tech we’re always curious about who out there is using digital platforms to connect people in interesting and innovative ways. Recently, a number of people we respect have begun to singing the praises of Notion and Camille, so we’re so stoked to have her on the podcast.Since she started as Head of Marketing, she and her team have invested in Notion superusers, swelling their ranks and meetup numbers in the name of educating even more Notion-curious people about what the platform is capable of.  If you want to get involved with Notion, download their app or go to their website: notion.soGrab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Are you ready for a good story about people power and the environment?Gravy because today we're talking to Jeff Kirschner who kickstarted a community of people around the world who are picking up the trash on our streets, parks, beaches, and more. They call themselves Litterati.Bailey met Jeff back in 2014, when she was still working at Instagram and Jeff’s Litterati hashtag was burgeoning on the site. People concerned about how we were leaving the planet were photographing the pieces of trash they were picking up everywhere from Oakland to the Great Wall of China. Since we met back then, Jeff built a standalone app for the Litterati community. With this new app, the community can catalogue exactly what piece of trash they’ve picked up where. Some of the members of the Litterati community pick up hundreds, even thousands, of pieces of trash EACH DAY.  To date, the cumulative impact is remarkable: 145,000+ people in the Litterati community have picked up 4.2 million pieces of trash. If you want to get involved with Litterati, download their app or go to their website: https://litterati.orgGrab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building

Today we're talking to Ruth Verhey, a clinical psychologist who works for the Friendship Bench team in Zimbabwe.Zimbabwe is a country of over 16 million people, but there are just twelve practicing psychiatrists. Twelve! These statistics are the norm in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the ratio of psychiatrists and psychologists to citizens is one for every 1.5 million and some countries don’t even have a single psychiatrist.And because of the history of trauma and war in the country, Ruth tells us that ~40% of Zimbabweans may be suffering from some form of depression and anxiety.Friendship Bench is beautiful community-sourced effort to close that gap. Grandmothers give their time to sit at benches and listen to people facing mental health challenges.Since 2006, Ruth, founder Dixon Chibanda, and their team have trained over 300 of the grandmothers in evidence-based talk therapy, which they deliver for free in more than 70 communities in Zimbabwe. In 2017 alone, the Friendship Bench, as the program is called, helped over 30,000 people there. The method has been empirically vetted—meaning this treatment works, in some studies its proven more effective than conventional treatments like anti-depressants—and has been expanded to countries beyond, including the US.This organization is all about training and capacity building, something we love. Asking others to help you with work - letting others participate - is what is so remarkable to us. It's hard for a lot of organizations to give up control, but in this case it has helped Friendship Bench reach more people than they ever could on their own.If you want to get involved with Friendship Bench, go to their website: www.friendshipbenchzimbabwe.org/Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building