Get Together
A show about ordinary people building extraordinary communities. "Get Together" is hosted by the team at People & Company and our correspondents Mia Quagliarello, Maggie Zhang, Marjorie Anderson, and Whitney Ogutu.
“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 Hansen
In 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.
????????Say hi to Todd and learn more about the Artist Rescue Trust.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“The question is ‘how do I keep my volunteers on track?’ because they're hugely motivated.” - David Lyford-Smith
If 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.
????????Say hi to David and learn more about Excel Community
✨Say hi to Mia, “Get Together” correspondent.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
"We are a part of their success. We are a part of their team.” - Ashley Hackworth
BTS 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.
????????Say hi to Ashley and learn more about the BTS A.R.M.Y.
✨Say hi to Mia and Maggie, “Get Together” correspondent.
????See the full transcript.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we've worked with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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'ethe
Lewis 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.
???????? Say hi to Lewis Kang'ethe and learn more about The Fearless Community.
✨ Thank you to Whitney Ogutu, “Get Together” correspondent, for bringing the story to us.
???? See the full transcript
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“The email that I would receive after every single town hall was, ‘I thought I was the only one.’” - Claire Wasserman
By 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.
????????Say hi to Claire and learn more about Ladies Get Paid.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Bedoian
Margaritaville 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.
????????Say hi to Adam and learn more about Latitude Margaritaville.
????See the full transcript
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Turner
When 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.
???????? Say hi to Chris and learn more about The Ring Finders.
✨Thank you to Mia, “Get Together” correspondent, for bringing us this story.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Pagès
As 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.
????????Say hi to Sophie Mona Pagès and learn more about LVRSNFRNDS.
✨Thank you to Marjorie, “Get Together” correspondent, for bringing us this story.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Leung
The 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.
????????Say hi to Sarah and learn more about The Woks of Life.
✨Say hi to Maggie Zhang, “Get Together” correspondent.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Zhang
Maggie 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.
????????Say hi to Maggie and share any ideas for the podcast at maggie(at)people-and.com
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Smith
Toastmasters 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 two 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.
????????Say hi to Joe and learn more about Toastmasters.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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-Salvador
In 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.
????????Say hi to Colombe, Laura, and Andrea and learn more about NOW!
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack, and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Sotto
People & 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.
????????Say hi to us, People & Company, and learn more about our work with organizations.
✨Special thank you to Marjorie Anderson, “Get Together” correspondent.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“In creating a home, I'm creating sustainability. And I'm creating excellence within the people that I'll be housing.”- Ceyenne Doroshow
Ceyenne 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.
????????Say hi to Ceyenne and learn more about G.L.I.T.S.
✨Say hi to Najva Sol, “Get Together” correspondent.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 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 conviene 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.
????????Say hi to Nicole and learn more about SameSide.
✨Say hi to Marjorie Anderson, “Get Together” correspondent.
????See the full transcript
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“Leadership is actually the first few followers, not the crazy first person to stand up on stage.” - Anna McAfee
In 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.
????????Say hi to Anna and grab a copy of her book.
✨Thank you to Mia Quagliarello, “Get Together” correspondent, for spotlighting Anna’s story with us.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Fernandez
In 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.
????????Say hi to Mary and Carla + learn more about The Dinner Party.
????See the notes from our live event!
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack, and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
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 Otieno
At twenty years old, Ongyango 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.
????????Say hi to Onyango (onyangohome@gmail.com) and learn more about Nyumbani
✨Say hi to Whitney Ogutu, “Get Together” correspondent.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“Listeners should expect refreshing and new voices from me. The plan is to put Africa on the map.” - Whitney Ogutu
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 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.
????????Say hi to Whitney on Twitter.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
"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 Beckford
Jodianne 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.
????????Say hi to Jodianne and learn more about Noire Girls Plant. She also has a podcast, The E Project which explores the ‘Epiphany’ moments that lead individuals to do what they love.
✨Say hi to Marjorie Anderson, “Get Together” correspondent.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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.
????????Say hi to Marjorie and learn more about Community by Association
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Garguilo
Early 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.
????????Say hi to Steve and learn more about Cultivate.
????See the full transcript and annotate insights.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe????and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
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.
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.
- Who: You! Leaders, community builders and other people navigating how to bring your people together.
- What: Following the live, 30-minute interview, we’ll have a town hall discussion to learn from each other’s responses to the pandemic.
- When: Friday November 20th 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM PT / 12:15 PM - 1:00 PM ET
- Where: Private Zoom listening room
- How much: $15 to register.
$5 from every ticket donated to The Dinner Party to support their mission to transform life after loss.
“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 Anderson
Many 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.
????????Say hi to Kibi Anderson and learn more about Red Table Talk.
????NEW! See the full transcript and leave thoughts, learnings, and insights in the comments plus respond to others.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
“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 Todd
In 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.
????????Say hi to Charlie Todd and see the Improv Everywhere missions in action on YouTube.
This podcast was created by the team at People & Company.
????Say hi! We would love to get to know you.
We published GET TOGETHER????, a handbook on community-building.
And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
Hit subscribe???? and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.
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!
“I'm fairly introverted which I find a lot of people are surprised by given the number of events that I've run over the years. I don't actually like attending events where I don't have a fairly structured role to play. I think to some extent being the organizer of the event gave me a role and job responsibilities. It helped me as an introvert feel more comfortable.” - Joe Robinson
By day, Joe Robinson is the Co-Founder of Hummingbird, a new service focused on fighting financial crime. But today we’re talking to him about his side project, a community he sparked called Designers + Geeks.
Joe started Designers + Geeks for people who, like him, love design, art, and technology. For the past decade, they’ve been featuring monthly speakers on niche topics—designing for all human senses, designing for dyslexia, designing for accessibility, designing for stigma—bringing people together in cities like San Francisco and New York.
This was not Joe’s first time around the block with community building. He founded Live Music SF and led Silicon Valley NewTech, a sister event to New York Tech and the first ever series on Meetup. Joe calls himself an introvert, which is surprising given he has hosted hundreds of meetups in his life. But Joe shares how being a leader in this situation has given him a structured role to play has made him more comfortable in this setting.
We dive in with Joe about how his introversion has helped him create meetups that are a comfortable experience for all.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
- Serial community builder. How Joe launched and led a number of local meetups as passion projects.
- The first gathering. What Joe did when only two people showed up to his first meetup.
- The introverted community leader. There is not one personality type that suits a community organizer.
- IRL vs. online. Establishing ritual, setting expectations, and running a meetup like clockwork.
- Paid vs. free events. Generating buy-in from members.
- Venue partnership. Creating a relationship that is mutually beneficial.
“We need people to see the power they have in themselves to make a very small change that can compound over time.” - Nate Nichols
Nate Nichols and Steffi Behringer are life and business partners and the founders of Allyship & Action. The Allyship & Action Summits took the advertising community by storm these past few months.
Like many others, their creative agency, Pallete Group, faced challenges when the pandemic hit. But they flipped the challenge into an opportunity, producing Freelancer Cyber Summit to connect freelancers and to “learn WTF is going on in the advertising industry.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Nate and Steffi spun up the Allyship & Action Summit as an urgent source of information on allyship, providing tangible next steps on anti-racism for ad land. The summit and supporting Slack groups and workshops connect allies to Black creatives and allies to learn and continue the conversation. They are also calling on major brands and organizations to sign the Allyship & Action Pledge, “a commitment to transparency with a common, core code we use every time we enter into our business transactions.”
Today on the podcast, we talk with Nate and Steffi about how they responded to uncertainty with action and filled a need for a community within their industry that promotes, facilitates, and pushes conversations related to anti-racism.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
- The power of language. What it means to be an ally.
- Sending a signal. Getting the word out through partners.
- Creating a brand and telling a story. How they brought Allyship & Action to life in a raw, unfiltered, honest way.
- Design choices. Allyship & Action’s secret sauce--making the audience feel as close as possible when meeting virtually.
- Building with. The transition from live events to an ongoing conversation initiated by the community.
“We really lean all the way in for our community so they can feel that they're working with somebody and not working for us.” - Jonathan Carey
Atlas Obscura is one of the few community-driven travel platforms.
The site focuses on the hard-to-find wonders and oddities of the world, from a church with Frederic Chopin’s heart in Poland to an abandoned Eurostar train covered in graffiti in France, to the Ottoman Bird Palaces (yes, ornate mansions for birds!) hiding in Istanbul. All of the 20,000+ discoveries are sourced by their community and published in partnership with “A.O.” staff editors.
Jonathan Carey is Associate Places Editor and Community Headmaster at Atlas Obscura, editing the places people submit and jumping into the forums to encourage conversation. He has developed an eye for spotting what suits the “A.O.” voice and can guide community submissions to the site so they fit the Atlas Obscura lens.
In this episode we talk with Jonathan about capturing and supercharging contributors enthusiasm by designing around natural instincts and treating contributors like staff members.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
- From user to team member. How Jonathan first got involved with Atlas Obscura.
- Why Atlas Obscura exists. An outlet for people who want to share what naturally excites them.
- “Build with.” Noticing the interests and desires of community members to help build the community up even stronger.
- Feedback loop. Creating guardrails for submission and keeping contributors in the loop as if they were staff writers.
- “That’s so AO.” Spotting the people most excited about what the platform has to offer through the depth and nuance of how they communicate.
- Hand-raiser stories. A superuser writes a book of the adventures they chronicled and how an email from a 7th grader sparked an art and writing prompts series at the beginning of quarantine.
“Community means there's a reason why these people are here, irrespective of the platform.” - Nadia Eghbal
If you haven’t heard of Substack, you will soon. The company is just three years old and growing quickly.
The co-founders came together to see if they could solve a problem: helping writers earn a living directly from their readers. When readers pay writers directly, the founders realized, writers can focus on doing the work they care about most, not what editors, algorithms or advertisers deem valuable.
Substack resembles the email newsletter tools you’re familiar with, but with a crucial twist. When readers subscribe to a Substack, you have the chance to pay the author for their work–maybe $3 a month, maybe $10 a month. With economies of scale, these paying subscribers can really add up for writers and for Substack, which takes a 10% cut of the revenue writers earn. Some writers have turned Substack into their full time gig and earn into the six figures, while others are using Substack as a reliable anchor of income.
We spoke with Fiona Monga and Nadia Eghbal, two of the early team members at Substack who work with the writer community. In their own rights, each have led impressive careers that add dynamic value to the Substack team. Having worked in publishing and at Instagram, Fiona understands how creators connect directly with growing audiences. Through Nadia’s past experience working at Github and writing Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, she’s developed an appreciation for the power of documentation to scale know-how.
In this episode, Fiona and Nadia share the systems and signals they have in place to notice and nurture best practices on the Substack platform.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
- Pinpointing their “kindling.” Writers with the potential to go independent were the kindling that sparked Substack’s community.
- Defining Substack’s “why.” How the Substack founders got clear as an organization on why they were bringing writers together.
- The platform vs. its communities. The community investments for Substack aim to increase the number of direct relationships writers have with each other, not with the Substack team or brand.
- Scaling support. How the Substack team manages their time with inbound requests, helping people help themselves and each other at scale.
“We know that there is a tomorrow and we want to be able to prepare our girls and our community for what that tomorrow looks like. Not only prepare them for it, but make sure that they have a hand in building it. ” - Isis Miller
Throughout her biotech engineering career, Kimberly Bryant was often the only black female in the room. Kimberly’s experience wasn’t rare. In fact, it’s the norm. Black women make up less than 0.5% of the leadership roles in tech.
As Kimberly watched her young daughter Kai grow a budding interest in gaming and coding, but with no spaces to explore or develop those interests alongside people that looked like her, Kimberly decided to take charge.
Kimberly and her colleagues at Genentech put together a six-week coding curriculum for girls of color in 2011, conducting the first educational series in a basement of a college prep institution in San Francisco. In a few years, the operation transformed from a basement experiment into a global non-profit with 15 chapters supported by volunteers under the name Black Girls CODE.
Today we interview Isis Miller, who joined the organization earlier this year just before COVID-19 struck.
We’ll talk to Isis about how Black Girls CODE has gone virtual with online workshops and career panels that reach out to 1,000 students per week and what a meaningful partnership with Black Girls CODE means.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
- Defining a holistic “why.” Learning to code is only part of the Black Girls CODE experience. People engage because it’s a space for girls to be inspired, motivated, and build confidence in addition to coding skills.
- Developing a community ecosystem. Programming engages not only girls who want to learn to code but also guardians, those that support them.
- Going digital. Zoom tricks that have kept Black Girls CODE true to their “why.”
- Honoring the moment. How Isis has created space to honor joy and trauma in grieving.
- Partnerships. Entering into a partnership is about building with–creating value that is not possible in one organization on their own.
“Community is not transactional by nature. Humans seek to connect on a deeper level. They're looking for validation or for support or for something bigger than themselves.
Now that community is such a buzzword. Everyone wants it and they want it quickly. We have more levers than ever, and they work. But when you growth hack with incentives, what you gain in volume, you erode in authenticity.” - Laura Nestler
In 2007, Laura Nestler responded to a Craigslist ad that “was either as sketchy as it sounded or her dream job.” Fortunately, it was her dream job with a little startup called Yelp.
She started as the community manager in Portland, Oregon, and would go on to spend a decade with the company refining their community playbook and living in cities all around the world, launching Yelp communities in new markets.
Now Laura is the Global Head of Community at Duolingo, a platform that hundreds of millions of people around the world turn to to learn a language. Before COVID, Duolingo users were hosting thousands of in-person language circles around the world each month. Laura shared how she did over forty iterative tests before Duolingo landing on this shared activity.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
- “Protect the source.” This guiding principle at Yelp ensured the community was a central focus.
- Community doesn’t happen through growth hacking. Social incentives are different from business incentives.
- The role of a community manager and executives are to tell the story of a community's value.
- Test and test again. Get something out there and make sure you are not solving for a personal bias. Laura tested and iterated on 40 events before they landed on Duolingo’s language circles.
“When you work in community, you get to be the person who thinks about the customer all day long, who thinks about people, who thinks about how they connect.” - Cindy Au
Cindy Au set out for a career in academia but soon found herself as employee #9 at Kickstarter. Back then, the community team would review and help write each project submitted to the site. Later as their VP of Community, she oversaw the evolution of Kickstarter as it grew from 50,000 users to 10 million.
After her experience at Kickstarter, Cindy launched the first community program at Zagat, the restaurant discovery platform. Now she’s the Director of Community & Engagement at Brainly, the world’s largest peer-to-peer learning community.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
- Cindy used the insights from her PhD in English to define the undefined space of community.
- Walking in the shoes of the user--how Cindy launched a Kickstarter campaign with her sisters and published Canine Chronicles
- Celebrating subsets of niche users at the Kickstarter Arcade
- Thinking like a newspaper--creating leaders in categories of expertise
- A side project (DimSum Club) that sent a signal to other DimSum lovers and was a catalyst to a new role at Zagat
- How Brainly is gamifying and incentivizing natural competitive instincts of students
“Ask your community: What they want to see out of the company to make them feel supported? I don't do anything until I talk to the community or reach out to them or say, ‘What do you want to see next? And then I make that a part of my plan.’” - Shana Sumers
HER Social App is the largest social community and dating app for LGBTQ+ womxn and queer people. Unlike other dating apps that tend to end the user journey when people find a partner, HER is also a place for users to return to for queer friendship and conversation.
Shana Sumers is the master behind the community at HER. She started as an ambassador of the app and now serves as the Head of Community, helping launch and grow it to over five million users worldwide.
She also co-hosts her own podcast, Bad Queers. And she worked as a music therapist for 5 years before joining the tech world, which influences her approach as a moderator.
On the podcast Shana shares how she doesn’t do anything without consulting her community first and how she has gone about making difficult decisions on the HER social app forums, where people would list their dating preferences that were sometimes phobic.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
[0:45] Intro to Shana and why the Get Together team is excited to interview her
[3:23] About HER and how Shana got involved on accident
[4:50] Creating space for LGBTQ+ womxn and queer people
[6:44] “This pride is different” - highlighting intersectionality of community
[9:26] “There is always more you can do” - taking ownership of inclusivity
[11:40] Serving as an outwardly facing leader and creating accountability internally for leadership
[14:50] Company's Shana admires for taking accountability in 2020 - Ben & Jerrys and Rihanna’s Fenty
[17:37] Separating your platform from your work identity and managing personal life as public facing figure of your company
[19:45] Transformative moment with members
[21:15] Decision making *with* the community and sourcing ideas
[22:39] Supercharging superusers and revamping moderators program
[24:40] Moderating difficult conversations
[28:45] Writing and updating community guidelines
[30:38] Why language matters and other learnings from background in music therapy
[32:40] Behind the scenes of Bad Queer podcast, "a show for people who feel like they came out of the closet and got placed in a box"
[36:00] Creating talking points for community forums
[38:06] Shana’s wish for the world ✨
“When you learn in community, your brain grows so much faster than it would on its own.” - Berna Anat
Berna brings hype to an otherwise “hella male, hella stale, and hella pale” financial space. She creates videos, writing, and hosts talks that encourage, support and celebrate those of us who struggle with personal finances.
This work is personal for Berna. Growing up a first-gen child of Filipino immigrants, money felt like a taboo topic. Berna set out to change that. Today she’s a writer, producer, speaker and “Fin-fluencer.”
Berna's devotion to creating content over the last two years bred fertile ground for a community. On the podcast she shares how she tested and launched a brand-new monthly membership program that connects community members to one another for financial learning and friendship.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
[3:43] Berna’s origin story--growing up the daughter of Filipino immigrants, talking about money was a taboo.
[9:40] Sending a signal--Berna’s first share behind the curtain of her personal finances.
[14:47] Role modeling the funky energetic vibes and vulnerability that her community has adopted.
[19:25] "Why"--Learning, and the power of doing so in community.
[24:30] Shared activities--Berna uses Instagram and Hella Helpful workshops to reach women-identifying millennials of color and all people left out of financial conversation.
[30:40] "Translating” financial language so it's fun and Berna's community will actually want to listen.
[35:50] Membership--Why Berna is starting a new "Hella Helpful" membership.
[37:50] Rituals--"budget date night" and hype texts for members.
[40:50] Building a thriving Slack channel *with* members.
[46:00] Pinpointing founding members and inviting into the group so they feel safe.
[48:00] Role modeling vs. community management.
[53:45] Berna is given the magic wand and makes her wish ✨
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.
“Hi, Bree, it’s Mariah. Mariah Carey...Please tell the fans thank you.”
In 1999, 16-year-old Bree Nguyen was hired by her idol, Mariah Carey, to do something urgent: get Mariah on Total Request Live (TRL).
Why hire a 16-year-old fan? Bree figured out one thing that music executives were unclear how to venture into: internet fandom.
If you’ve read our book, you may have already heard a snippet of Bree’s story and we don’t want to give it all away. In this episode Bree tells us the extraordinary story of how she first met Mariah and joined her team. Then, how she created a framework based on immersion into fandom that she would later repeat for artists like Michelle Branch, Ashlee Tisdale, My Chemical Romance, and Lincoln Park.
“We lack language for describing the ache when we crave for companionate emotional connection, for that friend bond. Whether it's an ache for a single close friend or a group of friends. I gave it is ‘platonic longing.’” - Kat Vellos
Kat Vellos is a user experience designer who uses her trade to help people connect authentically.
After moving to the Bay Area 6 years ago, Kat for the first time found herself struggling to make adult friends. She felt, as she describes it, a “platonic longing,” and decided to use her skills as a user experience designer to make friendship more “user-friendly.” The result of this research is her new book We Should Get Together, which tackles the four most common challenges of adult friendship: relocation, full schedules, the demands of partnership and family, and our culture’s declining capacity for compassion and intimacy in the social age. When the pandemic caused social isolation, Kat released an addendum to her book, Connected from Afar, which offers six months of weekly connection prompts that you can use to nurture your faraway friendships.
In addition to her work designing, researching and writing, Kat is also a community builder. In her early days in San Francisco, Kat created an event called Better Than Small Talk to break through the wall of small talk and get into real, heart-pumping, mind-sparkling conversations. Kat also sparked the Bay Area Black Designers community, which is described as “Silicon Valley’s largest unofficial ERG for Black designers.” She started with five or six other local designers in her living room and now has over 500 members providing professional development and community for Black designers, in particular those who know how isolating it can be the only Black designer in a company or design team.
On the podcast, we talk with Kat about cultivating deep friendships in a sea of busy, mobile people and sparking community in otherwise isolating situations.
“Every party needs a host. Every team needs a coach. It's no different online than it is in our real world communities.” - Lindsay Russell
At Facebook, Lindsay Russell was a part of the team that used data to identify, validate and supercharge the company’s biggest community building investments to date.
In their research on what makes a Facebook group active, even vibrant, Lindsay. and her team realized that successful groups had one clear commonality: a remarkable admin. These admins were spending hours every day running the platform's most engaged groups, where users were talking about everything from infertility and miscarriages, to gender politics in Nigeria, even dog spotting and cruise-going.
That core insight led Lindsay and her team to spearhead a novel effort within Facebook’s walls: investing in the community of power admins who were essential to the product’s success. If the groups team wanted to supercharge their product, they’d need to supercharge these power admins–empowering more of them to fulfill core tasks for their groups. With the help of power admins, Facebook groups would affect more people and sustain itself longer than the product and marketing Facebook teams at HQ could have managed on their own.
In this episode of the “Get Together” Podcast, we sat down with Lindsay to learn more about her experience spearheading Facebook’s big pivot towards supporting communities. What can we learn about building successful groups from her research? What investments helped community leaders spark and stoke their communities? Tune in for more.
“It's important that people realize that extraordinary women are not just the heroes of the past, but they are around us every day today. They are already part of our communities. We just need to look a little deeper and more carefully, but they are already there.” - Elena Favilli
Elena Favilli found herself at the center of an all too familiar story of women in the startup world. She was in Silicon Valley working on her company Timbuktu and finding it hard to make friends with investors, get support, and raise money as a woman.
From that pain point, she made it her mission to contribute in her life to gender equality. Elena began researching gender representation in children's books to start. After observing her favorite children's stories, she noticed they all centered around male characters. She asked the bold question: what if this was different?
Elena started a newsletter called “Who Framed Cinderella: Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls,” where she promised each week to showcase one story of an amazing woman like Maria Sibylla Merian, a 1700s scientist and artist who discovered the metamorphosis of butterflies (before that people thought butterflies appeared out of mud like magic!). She sent out the first newsletter to 25 friends and received eager responses for more stories like Maria’s. So each week she continued to tell stories of historical figures and contemporaries until she reached 4,000 subscribers. With an audience behind her, she launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a book that quickly exceeded her $400,000 goal climbing to a total of $1.2 million in funding, breaking a record as the most crowdfunded campaign in literary history.
Rebel Girls shifts a narrative by spotlighting real women as the heroes and showing kids that women can do amazing things just like men. Elena published Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls with the help of 60 women illustrators around the world and a sequel with crowdsourced stories from dedicated readers. We talked with Elena about how she used crowdfunding to gauge interest and how she has collected contributions from readers, telling the story with her audience.
“I think that there's just some stubborn part of me that wants benevolence towards strangers to be more accepted and widespread. That's my underlying mission.” - Ivan Cash
Ivan Cash is an interactive artist and filmmaker whose work celebrates and inspires connections among strangers. He has received high accolades for his work (Forbes 30 Under 30, Cannes Lions Shortlist, exhibitions in V&A Museum and The Brooklyn Museum). But that’s not why we interviewed him on the podcast. We brought him on the podcast to go deep on the techniques he uses to connect strangers through art.
Ivan is one of the creatives we admire most who use storytelling and art to actually bring people together, connecting strangers through small, benevolent collaborations that add up to much more. His first community art project, "Snail Mail My Email," invited volunteers to transform strangers’ emails into handwritten letters, free of charge. In the six years it ran, 2,000 volunteers sent 29,249 letters to 80 countries. From there, he launched The Passenger Project, connecting strangers sharing the same plane, and Selfless Portraits, which gave strangers permission to draw each others’ Facebook profile pictures.
Recently, Ivan released “A Social Distance,” a film that features a montage of people living in countries most impacted by COVID-19 and was viewed by people around the world.
We talked with Ivan about turning an idea into a project, setting constraints to foster group creativity, and engaging people who care as collaborators.
“Every piece that's knit is 20 to 30 hours of somebody thinking about climate. And then every person who sees that piece thinks about it and hopefully talks about it...It's activism, but sort of a cozy activism, a “craftivism,” that's not too threatening to people and permeates conversations and dialogue about climate change.” - Justin Connelly and Emily McNeil
Knitters have been doing temperature knitting for a long time--checking their thermometer on their porch every day, writing down the information, and turning data into patterns for a particular year or time period. But today there is a growing movement of turning these crafts into political statements. Justin Connelly, Emily McNeil, and their co-founder Marissa Connelly have codified this practice into a shared framework and language that cohesively illustrates the history of climate change.
They call their efforts the Tempesty Project. The project started in 2017 as a DIY guide for activists and knitters to extract and preserve environmental data in the form of scarves and wall hangings. Local knitters were eager to get involved in the project but not as excited about extracting the data. So, Justin, Emily, and Marissa created a kit with data and let the knitters do their knitting.
Two-thousand people have purchased the kits and are spreading the story about climate change with colors. Groups in local churches, classrooms, college campuses and towns have weaved years of history, some as far back as the late 1800s which is on display at the Philadelphia Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.
By banding together, what would have been an isolated experience of climate transforms into a collective language for activism and environmental change.
“Mom, Dad, Uncle, Auntie, Grandfather, Grandmother: We need to talk.You may not have grown up around people who are Black, but I have. Black people are a fundamental part of my life: they are my friends, my classmates and teammates, my roommates, my family. Today, I’m scared for them.” - Letters for Black Lives
In 2016, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man in Minnesota, was shot by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. Philando’s girlfriend streamed the aftermath on Facebook Live and incorrectly identified the police officer as “Chinese.” Christina Xu, a 28-year-old Chinese-American, tweeted a call for other Asian Americans in support of Black Lives Matter. She encouraged them to talk with their families about why they stand in solidarity with other people of color. Sparked by this tweet, thousands would convene online to collaboratively write letters about anti-Blackness to their elders in 23 languages. They called the effort Letters for Black Lives.
When the death of George Floyd reignited an urgent conversation around Blackness in 2020, Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani and Hema Karunakaram raised their hands to push the project forward. Adrienne, a first generation Iranian-Ameican, started to rewrite the original 2016 Letter for Black Lives as a guide for conversation with her family. She revisited the Letters for Black Lives Slack group and asked if anyone would want to join her in this effort. Hema was one of the members of the group that volunteered again.
We talked with Adrienne and Hema about what it was like to collaborate with hundreds of people from around the world to come up with one clear message and bring this message to life with their elders.
“If you're going to lead an organization, it's likely that more of your time and energy is going into building an engine and less of your time and energy is going into facilitating connection between people. It's really important for community leaders to recognize if they want to lead an organization or if they want to facilitate connection.” -- Ankit Shah
Motivated by a sense of nostalgia during his senior year of college, Ankit Shah posted an open call: he wanted to get tea with anyone on campus who he hadn’t met before. To his surprise, 250 University of Pennsylvania students said “yes” and he found himself spending the last 6 weeks of college meeting with six new people for three hours every night in the same cafe.
He realized that strangers were excited to meet and learn about each other beyond surface day-to-day interactions. After graduation, he founded an organization called Tea with Strangers, which paired strangers together for small group conversations. Since its founding in May 2014, it has brought over 50,000 people in 25 cities together. Today, Ankit has brought this community-first mindset to his work at Facebook and Airbnb, and also to his personal life, creating Silent Hike Society and weekly neighborhood gatherings.
In this episode, we learned about how Ankit grew a global community of hosts for Tea with Strangers, how he translated his learnings into a career, and the value of alone time as a community-builder.
Hear more stories from community leaders like Ankit who are passing the torch and creating more leaders at: https://gettogetherbook.com/resources#pass-the-torch
“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 hours
We’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 Podcast
So 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 Berman
In 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-Yin
Kuik 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 Crenshaw
Where 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.net
Grab 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.com
Grab 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.
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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 @newinc
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 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:
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.
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For more from Scott and COS Tech Network, head to:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.so
Grab 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.org
Grab 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/
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Today we're talking to Krystie Mak and Katerina Jeng, the founders of Slant'd, a collective that celebrates Asian American identity, one story at a time
Back in 2017, a piece of advice from Eddie Huang inspired Krystie and Katerina: “If spaces don’t exist for you, kick the door down and create them.”
Krystie and Kat didn’t see themselves in mainstream media. They wanted a place to share personal stories—not about celebrities, but told by real Asian-American peers. So they decided to kick down the door and create their own space.
When they did, they unlocked a groundswell of energy. They set out to create a humble zine, which quickly turned into a magazine, backed by a passionate set of crowdfunders.
When they hosted a magazine launch party, it blew up too. They turned that launch party into a thriving events series.
In today's episode, we’ll get into the nitty gritty of how they got Slant’d off the ground, and how they’re exploring building Slant’d as a business now.
If you want to get involved with Slant’d, go to their website slantd.media or follow them on Instagram @slantdmedia
Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building
Today we are talking to Jamie Allen and Sally Parham, two of the folks behind The Squirrel Census.
Yes, it is just what it sounds like.
The Squirrel Census started in Atlanta in 2012 with a simple, somewhat inexplicable, wild idea: let's count squirrels and present our findings to the public.
While they're certainly rigorous, what they're doing isn't dry science. The team is considerate, design-savvy, and deeply funny people. They've made a scientific activity into something not just accessible, but playful.
Jamie, the creator of the project, formed a team early on of cartographers, artists, scientists and more to bring the first census to life. The team trained hundreds of volunteers they call Squirrel Sighters to count squirrels, then spent the coming months preparing the data and stories they gathered to the community.
Since that first census in Atlanta's Inman Park, the team has hosted 3 more, including most recently an ambitious foray into Central Park. More than 500 New Yorkers came out to count squirrels with them, and it was all over the news, spurred on by features inThe New York Times, support from leaders at the Parks Association, and pun-filled tweets by the NYC Mayor's Office.
If you want to get involved with the Squirrel Census, check out their hilarious website thesquirrelcensus.com or scope them out on Twitter @squirrelcensus.
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Girls' Night In started as a simple but remarkable newsletter to 300 of Alisha Ramos' friends and family in 2017. It took off immediately. Now, there are more than 150,000 subscribers.
As the Girls' Night In audience has grown, it’s transformed into more than just a media company. As more passionate readers came into Alisha’s world, she activated them, turning women into local book club leaders, employees and contributors.
Alisha is swinging big to bring her mission of making wellness, and social wellness, available to more and more people. She quit her tech job to focus on Girls' Night In full time, and even raised venture funding.
How did Alisha get “GNI” off the ground? What made the early newsletter so popular? How has she transformed the media company into a community, and how does she think about the business side? Tune in to find out.
Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building
August 20th, 2019 is a momentous day for us. Our book "Get Together: How to build a community with your people" is now officially out in the world.
This book is a handbook, and it's full of both clear steps and principles and inspiring stories. It’s the book Kevin and I wish we had back in the day when we were working at Instagram and CreativeMornings, but it just didn’t exist yet. If you need help getting a community off the ground, or just understanding the work it takes to organize a passionate group of people, this book is for you.
Because y’all are our loyal podcast listeners, we thought we’d share a sneak peek of the audiobook with you. So instead of an interview in this podcast episode, we’re going to share the first chapter of our audiobook with you. We hope you enjoy it.
Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building
Today we're talking to Cassandra Lam, co-founder of The Cosmos.
Cassandra and co-founder Karen Mok started The Cosmos with a simple question: what does it mean for Asian women and gender non-binary people to not just survive, but to thrive? To not merely assimilate, but to carve their own paths?
For their first community event, 20 strangers from all around the country flew to Seattle to meet Cassie and Karen and explore these questions together. After that weekend, Cassie and Karen put the attendees in a Slack group together. Then hosted another retreat. And another.
Now The Cosmos has more than 5,000 members in cities around the country. Their book club was just featured in The New York Times and in just a few weeks, 500 members will gather for their very first summit here in New York City.
What motivated Cassie and Karen start this group? How did they get it off the ground? What’s their big, bold vision for the future? Tune in to find out.
Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building
Today we’re interviewing… ourselves! Bailey, Kevin and Kai, the voices behind the “Get Together” podcast and brains behind People & Company.
Three years ago, we started People & Company to help more people bring their people together.
We work with organizations to make smarter bets about investing in their communities.
We also interview extraordinary people organizers on this podcast. And in August 2019 we will publish a book called "Get Together" on how to build communities today. It's based on the conversations, research and strategy work we've done with hundreds of community organizers.
In the past, Bailey grew the communities around Instagram, IDEO, StoryCorps, Pop-Up Magazine and The California Sunday Magazine. Kevin breathes strategy and structure. He advises dozens of grassroots communities and in the past operationalized CreativeMornings, rolling out events to 100 cities. Kai focuses on how true communities fuel growth for companies. He helped pioneer Facebook’s growth discipline and launch Instagram’s business internationally.
Why did we start People & Company (http://peopleand.company)? Why did we start a podcast and write a book? What have we learned in the process? We’ll dig into all of that in this podcast together.
GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building
Today we're talking to Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers, a primarily online community for independent entrepreneurs. By “independent” I mean these are people who are building businesses that make their money from customers. (They're not backed by investors.)
What started as 150 personal emails to Courtland's friends and some strangers has grown today to a community of more than 60,000 entrepreneurs.
These people come together on Indie Hackers to share valuable stories and insights, or tap each others inspiration and advice. Sometimes, they get together in person too. Last month there were 55 Indie Hacker meetups all around the world.
We sat down to talk to Courtland about getting his community off the ground, why they are open and explicit about revenue numbers with one another, and how he's approached building a business with Indie Hackers.
“At headquarters, you are in service of the community.” - CreativeMornings Chief Community Officer Kyle Baptista
Since the very first CreativeMornings in Brooklyn over ten years ago, the grassroots events have spread to more than 200 chapters around the world—everywhere from Louisville to Tehran.
The concept is simple: breakfast and a short talk one Friday morning a month. Every event is free of charge and open to anyone. Lecturers include founders like David Kelley and Jason Fried, artists like Jonathan Harris and Lisa Congdon, and writers like Maria Popova.
How did CreativeMornings onboard more than 1,500 volunteer organizers and spread all around the world? Our very own Kevin Huynh, employee #1 at CreativeMornings, sat down with current Chief Community Officer Kyle Baptista and Head of Community Lisa Cifuentes to learn more.
“I don’t think there’s much secret. Get the product right, treat the customer well, and get them talking. And that’s it.” - Instant Pot founder Robert Wang
Instant Pot, the multipurpose pressure cooker, is so remarkable that it has spurred an outpouring of enthusiasm from a community of fans around the world. Some Potheads name their Pots, while others knit sweaters for the appliances.
That zeal wasn’t a surprise to founder Robert Wang, due to a core insight he had early on. “Cooking is not a solitary practice. It’s very much a social practice,” he tells us. “You cook for your family, you cook for your friends, you’ll throw a party if you make a dish.”
Today, more than 1.8 million “Potheads” of all ages, languages, and backgrounds have joined their Facebook group to share recipes and Instant Pot fandom. Robert and his team opened the group in 2015, imagining it as a space where customers separated by geography could help each other with Instant Pot questions—both connecting superfans and lightening the burden on the company’s customer support team.
We talk to Robert in this episode about how this community sparked and grew, and how they've approached their Facebook group as it's grown.
"I've always dreamed of a soup party." - Liz Alpern
On today’s show we interview Liz Alpern, one of the founders of Queer Soup Night.
Queer Soup Night started in Brooklyn with a simple event format. Liz, a queer professional chef made a soup, attendees got to enjoy that soup (and a party!) in exchange for a suggested donation to a cause.
The first one went so well, Liz and her partners Jen Martin and Kathleen Cunningham knew they had to keep going.
Now, there are Queer Soup Nights in chapters round the country - from Oakland and Portland to Gainesville and Boston. Their events have raised thousands of dollars for Queer and Queer adjacent causes, from New York Transgender Advocacy Group to the Center for Anti-Violence Education.
Why soup? Why a party with a charity? Why launch chapters? We'll get into the whole story with Liz today on the podcast.
We’re definitely much more about community—bringing people together and having a good time. The competition is almost the excuse for doing that." — says Tim Williams, CEO of the World AeroPress Championship (W.A.C.).
Last year, the World AeroPress Championship (W.A.C.) season brought together more than 3,000 competitors at 120 events in over 60 countries.
But the idea started with much humbler beginnings—three coffee geeks and a cake in a small room in Norway.
Why start a competition? When the organizers, internationally renowned baristas Tim Wendelboe and Tim Varney, hosted the first event in 2008, the AeroPress brewing device had only recently been released on the market. Instead of spending months in isolation trying to work out how to develop better AeroPress brewing recipes on their own, the Tims decided to crowdsource ideas from other brewers through a small competition in Oslo, which they called the “World AeroPress Championship.”
In the years that followed, fans all around the world asked to lead their own events, and the format began to spread. We interview the CEO, Tim Williams to learn more about what makes the competition special and what structure he and his team offer organizers from HQ.
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 in our office in the Lower East Side to learn more.
"The most surprising thing for me was how many people showed up on day one. And that continues to be the most surprising thing - that people are still showing up on day 300. Every time a stranger comes, I'm just like, where did you come from? It is amazing, and it's a huge motivator to keep me going." - Aria McManus
Aria McManus, an artist and creative director, started Downtown Girls Basketball in 2013. From the beginning, it was a team for women and people who don't identify as male "who are specifically bad at basketball."
At the first practice, 30 of Aria's artist and designer friends rolled out to play together. They had so much fun, Aria hosted another game the following week.
In the six years since, that core group has ballooned to a rotating crew of 400+ of women (including Bailey, this show’s host). Every week they come together to get exercise, revive their love for basketball, and, most importantly, goof off with other creative, playful women.
How did Aria build something so special? What makes her approach to women's basketball different from other leagues and pick up games? What keeps her going six years down the road? We sat down with Aria in the Lower East Side to learn more.
*“The film was made in this amazing period in YouTube’s history where we were focused on how we could demonstrate the ways in which technology can be both innovative and net positive—how it was driving new ways of storytelling and building community.” - Sara Pollack
*
This episode we talk to YouTube's first film community manager, Sara Pollack, to learn more about a film YouTube made called "Life in a Day."
On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to create Life in a Day, a cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth.
All in all, 80,000 submissions containing over 4,500 hours of footage from 192 nations were edited into one 90-minute film of raw, first-person scenes from real people around the globe, echoing the experience of YouTube itself. To bring cohesion to the submissions, users were given a range of prompts from “What do you love?” and “What do you fear?” to “What’s in your pocket?” to respond to with their footage.
Since the "Life in a Day"'s debut on the site in 2011, more than 15 million people have watched the film. (You can still watch it there today.)
How did YouTube come up with the idea for the film? How did they get the word out to YouTubers and to the world? Why did they create a film in the first place? We called Sara to find out.
*“Every single time we go out there, we're looking to make a connection with people-to make people feel like they came to the right place and that they can carry that forward. A critical number of people have shown us or told us that what we're doing is important to them and that keeps us going.” - Nobu Adilman
*
In 2010, Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman posted on Facebook asking if anyone wanted to sing in a choir with them at a real estate office where a friend worked in Toronto. He and Daveed prepared some minor arrangements to "Nowhere Man" by The Beatles and "Just A Smile" by Pilot. "It was kind of extraordinary what happened that night. People we didn't even know showed up," Nobu told us.
At the end of the evening, people wanted us to do it again the next day. Choir! Choir! Choir! was born. They ended up hosting the Choir! every Tuesday for the next year.
To participate in a Choir! Choir! Choir! event, you simply show up to their venue, pay five dollars for a lyrics sheet (more if they're touring), rehearse a three-part harmony, and then perform it with a crowd of strangers. Many of their videos have gone viral, from Prince and David Bowie tributes, to sing-alongs led in-person by famous musicians like David Byrne, Rufus Wainwright, and Patti Smith. In our interview, we ask Nobu about how Choir! Choir! Choir! went from something he and some friends started in a real estate office in Toronto to the phenomenon it has become.
"These communities feel magical, but they don't come together by magic. Someone has to take the first step. " - Kevin Huynh
This is a special episode.
Today I'm interviewing our very own Kevin Christopher Huynh aka "Coach Kevin." Kevin's my co-host, biz partner, bud, and one of the most admirable, fun souls I've met on this planet called Earth.
We're talking to Kevin today about his coaching. Nearly every work day for the last month and a half, Kevin has taken at least one coaching meeting with a nascent community leader. In total he's had 3 conversations in 35 work days, and he's now totally booked through March. (If you want to book a session, reach out here!)
These are not hypothetical communities. These are real groups of people who are actively getting together. We're talking about people like →
- Krystie, Kat, Kasey from Slant'd Media - an Asian-American media company that gets writers, photographer contributors brought into the fold and hosts events.
- Kyle from Innerglow - one of the most diverse meditation communities in New York City.
- Lynn from Homoground - the longest-running queer music podcast with an engaged community of listeners, many of whom don't have access to a queer community near them.
I ask Kevin about what he learned from all these conversations. It'll just be us chatting. If you want to read more of his insights, you can check out his post on research.people-and.com.
"Why join Surfrider? You’re going to have friends for life. I hear people say this is the best thing that they’ve ever done, and that’s
pretty amazing. Beyond all the good work we’re doing, there’s that
human element that’s probably equally valuable." - Dr. Chad Nelsen,
Surfrider CEO
If you’re a surfer, you probably know the Surfrider Foundation. But if you don’t know them, you’re in for a dose of inspiration in this episode of the podcast.
The Surfrider Foundation was formed in 1984 by a handful of surfers who gathered together to protect their home break in Malibu, California, from development and pollution. Now there are 190 Surfrider chapters and clubs and over 500,000 activists and supporters worldwide. These chapters share resources, insights, and form coalitions to push forward the same purpose: protecting the world’s ocean, waves, and beaches.
We spoke to Dr. Chad Nelsen, the CEO of Surfrider. Chad started working at Surfrider when he was 28 years-old and fresh out of grad school. At that time the foundation had just six employees and 20 chapters.
In our conversation Chad shares what they’ve done to expand the organization and its impact—an artful blend of refining their strategy, structure, and storytelling and keeping a sense of fun at the center of what they do.
"Running uptown isn't normal, especially our kind of social running.
You might see one middle-aged white person running along Riverside
Drive on a long run, but you never saw anyone running on Broadway,
Amsterdam, or Washington Avenue. So when people started seeing a big
group of us running, it’s very, very different from what they’re used
to." - Hector Espinal, WRU Crew
Growing up in NYC’s Washington Heights neighborhood, Hector Espinal never imagined he’d one day become a runner. “I've never played any sports. All the men in my family are really into sports but me, so I’ve always kind of been the black sheep,” Hec told us. And looking back, he and his friends felt like their neighborhood discouraged a healthy lifestyle, with fast food joints on every corner and few public spaces to play in.
To motivate himself to get fit five years ago, Hector Espinal would invite everyone he knew to join him on runs. Hec stuck with it week in and week out, and soon he had a group of regulars joining him. Today We Run Uptown, or WRU Crew, the run club Hec started, meets every week, even through the dead of winter. As many as 100 diverse runners gather at the same spot in Washington Heights on Mondays at 7:00 pm then take to the streets to hoots and hollers of support from folks in the neighborhood.
How did Hector build something so special? We sat down with him in Central Park to learn more.
"The Get-Together" is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?
In 2009, Todd Bol erected the very first Little Free Library book exchange in his front yard in Hudson, Wisconsin. Crafted from an old wooden garage door he didn't want to throw out, Todd built the little library as an ode to his late mother, a schoolteacher and lifelong reader.
Todd watched as the simple concept resonated with his neighbors. Soon people were asking Todd for their own little libraries. By the time of Todd's death in October 2018, there were more than 75,000 registered Little Free Library book exchanges around the world in 88 countries.
To learn more about how Todd's simple idea turned into a global movement, we caught up with Margret Aldrich, who leads Marketing & Communication for the organization and authored *The Little Free Library Book*.
"The Get-Together" is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?
In this episode we interview Dan Madsen, the secret sauce behind the Star Wars Fan Club and the first Star Wars Celebrations.
After a fan zine he created as a Denver teenager was noticed by George Lucas himself, Lucasfilm asked Dan to help them. He was tasked with “[keeping] Star Wars in front of people. I had to keep it alive and vibrant, keep the excitement up,” Dan told us, and man did he nail it.
Dan took over the Star Wars Insider magazine, growing it to 500,000 subscribers at its peak). Eventually he also took the reins of the official Star Wars Fan Club (growing it to 180,000 members), ran a $20 million collectibles business and hosted the very first Star Wars Celebration, bringing tens of thousands of Star Wars fans from around the world together for the first time.
In our interview, we ask Dan about his lifelong devotion to Star Wars and its fans. We’ll dig into how Dan made that first Celebration a success, and also about how he grew his relationship with Lucasfilm from that first zine to a global fan enterprise.
*"Whenever we're vulnerable, it enhances our ability to connect."* - Lola Omolola, founder of FIN
The Get-Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?
In this episode, we'll speak to Lola Omolola about FIN, the private Facebook group she started for Nigerian women. Today, FIN has 1.8 million members and gets hundreds of post applications every day. The Facebook group is managed by 10 volunteer moderators.
But how did Lola get the first conversations started? How did the first members find out about FIN? We called her in Chicago to learn more.
“I always felt that clouds are a beautiful part of nature that we can become blind to." - Gavin Pretor-Pinney
"The Get-Together" is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?
Today we'll talk to Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society.
In 2004, a friend invited Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a graphic designer, to speak at a literary festival in Cornwall. In hopes of drawing a crowd, Gavin dreamt up an enticing title for his talk, “The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society.”
The title worked. Gavin’s talk was chock full of attendees. When he invited audience members to claim an official society pin, Gavin was bombarded. People asked him for more information about the Cloud Appreciation Society, and Gavin had to tell them the society didn’t exist… yet.
He went home and set up a simple website. After just a few months, 2,000 people had joined the society. Today, there are over 45,000 paying members around the world.
How did Gavin build something so special? We called him at his home in Somerset, England, to find out.
If you take away one thing from this podcast, we hope it’s this: don’t fixate on what to ask from people; instead, focus on what you can do with them.
"Get Together" is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh will ask everyday people who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members? You’ll hear us interview a diverse set of organizers, everyone from the head of the Star Wars Fan Club to Lola Omolola, whose Female IN private Facebook group now has more than 1.7m members.
But first, we’ll introduce the people behind the podcast. Bailey, Kevin and Kai are the partners behind People & Company. Together they help organizations build communities—real ones filled with humans who genuinely care and keep showing up. In this pilot episode, you'll learn more about their past work (Instagram, CreativeMornings, eBay) and what makes them tic.
