This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here.

“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 Sophie found on dating apps whom 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. 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 Sophie about developing a playbook that captures shared values, facilitating online conversations, and why this work matters to her.

You can listen to the full episode here:

Just like when building a fire, there’s an order of operations you can follow to cultivate communities that burn bright.

In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we take you through three stages of building a community: sparking the flame, stoking the fire, and passing the torch.

In our recent interview with Sophie, she offers insights into the second step: stoking the fire.

Communicating and practicing shared values.

At the beginning, it felt like a natural step to craft community guidelines. The guidelines set out as an invitation of how people could show up. They are the basic requirements. But, Sophie realized “it’s not something that we can do on our own.” Sophie crafted a playbook with LVRSNFRNDS members that articulate the nuances of the values lived out.

Together they have documented how-to resource on inclusive language and having good conversations plus the process for accountability for acting in opposition to the values. They acknowledge in the playbook that people mess up and created a system to talk with members when they do something wrong. Then, empower them with the tools to do better.

Attracting new folks.

You can’t skimp on the onboarding process. It’s where trust is bred. You can say you have a safe space but how do people really feel in it?

LVRSNFRNDS continues to select new members based on their shared values and intent.

Because the bulk of what happens sits behind closed doors in membership-based communities, members don’t always know exactly what they are walking into. LVRSNFRNDS onboards new members, hosting introductions to one another and the shared values so they have a shared foundation.

Going virtual.

Figuring out how to create a space in real life that is diverse, inclusive, and intimate takes time and attention. Doing so online brings a new set of unique challenges. When Sophie made the transition online she “empowered everyone to be a host.”

Where nonverbal cues would typically prompt conversation in person, Sophie asks members to speak explicitly — inviting people to speak who might look hesitant and for the extroverts to be mindful of their airtime.

They have employed the “fish bowl” method so that people can show up as themself — introverted or extroverted. The concept is simple: if you want to speak, leave your camera on. If you just want to listen, turn your camera off. This allowed people to engage at their own comfort level.

If you want to find Sophie online and learn about LVRSNFRNDS, head over to her website.

Thank you to Marjorie Anderson for bringing Sophie’s story to us.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

LVRSNFRNDS: a group to support modern love of all kinds was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here.

“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.

You can listen to the full episode here:

Just like when building a fire, there’s an order of operations you can follow to cultivate communities that burn bright.

In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we take you through three stages of building a community: sparking the flame, stoking the fire, and passing the torch.

In our recent interview with the co-founder of The Woks of Life Sarah Leung, she offers insights into the second step: stoking the fire.

You can’t fake the funk.

Communities spring from a personal place. When Sarah and her sister Kaitlin were in college, their parents moved to China. Living in opposite time-zones, there was a tiny window to talk each day early in the morning or late in the evening and the conversation usually centered around food.

The sisters realized that without their parents around, they were not eating many of the dishes they’d grown up with. For the Leung family, the blog became a “way to stay connected across that incredible distance, and over something that we all agreed on and enjoyed.”

There are parallels to the Green brothers who began recording video messages to each other while apart on personal topics of loneliness, mental health, and things they are learning about. When they shared online, they found resonance. People saw bits of themselves in the brothers.

In approaching The Woks of Life as a way to reconnect, the Leungs captured a sincere story that resonated with many other Chinese Americans and people curious about Chinese culture and recipes.

Role model storytelling.

In that personal spirit, the Leungs started using The Woks of Life as a place to record the history and dishes they wanted to keep track of themselves. They treated it almost like a diary, writing memories associated with each recipe.

Later, it became a conscious choice to use stories to convey the context these recipes sit in. The Leung’s now make clear that the site is “about this continuity through generations and the memories that are connected with every dish.”

Certainly, site visitors have different motivations when searching for a recipe. Some people want to go straight for the ingredients and start cooking. But others keep coming back to The Woks of Life for the stories and are motivated to share themselves. By sharing their own stories, the Leungs are setting the tone and encouraging readers to do the same in the comments. That kind of textured sharing can bridge the gaps between strangers and make the site more than just a place to find a recipe.

Curating the conversations on “The Woks of Life.”

The Leung’s asked early on: are we only going to document authentically mainland Chinese food? No, they decided. Chinese American dishes had become a central part of their experience of Chinese cuisine growing up in New York.

“The glue to all of those different lenses is that our family has, in some way, has been touched by all of those things,” Sarah shared.

People from lots of different backgrounds have found an entry point to the blog because there is a recipe that’s familiar to them. Considering how niche their topic is, their audience is diverse. That’s because The Woks of Life isn’t just about a specific type of food, it’s about the power of sharing it with one another — and experience we all can connect to.

Say hi to Sarah and check out the recipes on The Woks of Life.

Thank you to Maggie Zhang, Get Together correspondent, for boring this story to us.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack, and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

The Woks of Life: How stories of food & family bring thousands of people together was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here.

“When you create a team, a group of people that actually want to take action, you are halfway to success.” — Andrea Venzon

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.

You can listen to the full episode here:

In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we share a framework to spark, stoke, and scale community.

The NOW! team offers insights into the first step: Sparking the flame.

A watering hole that bridges gaps.

Colombe and Andrea had the early instinct that, “you can’t solve global issues at a European level.” They shifted their efforts and forged a plan to bridge gaps across borders.

The first step they took was creating a space for people to unite, communicate, and work together. Because their global community had varying access to social platforms from WhatsApp to Facebook, NOW! invested in the development of their own platform. To fund this development, Colombe and Andrea asked people to buy a membership upfront. They shared across social platforms and made direct contact with people involved in Volt. On the first day, 2,000 people registered.

The space grew over the first ten months into organized forum discussions, interest, and advocacy groups. They now have represented more than a hundred countries.

Activism shared activities that are purposeful, participatory, and repeatable.

NOW! hosts weekly Community Chats which allow volunteers to tap into the community’s purpose: to learn more about global issues. This shared activity connects volunteers globally and manifests a sense of unity in a way that is untraditional from the party system and movements in the US.

NOW! set strong guidelines that allow people to share and respect different viewpoints. “Agreeing to disagree during community chats is one of the most important things,” Laura told us.

The Community Chats have grown with a number of energetic volunteers. Discussions have birthed campaigns on topics ranging from women’s rights in Tunisia, LGBTQ rights, and tech’s impact on democracy.

An origin story that challenges corporate politics.

NOW! is pursuing a bold vision. They have set out to unite people in a global movement. If they choose to make their statement in that way, it would be easy for people to be skeptical or confused.

Where NOW! has found traction in communicating their message is in real-world terms. “We don’t spend our time thinking up big concepts and then talking about them with very complicated words,” Colombe shares. When Colombe, Andrea, and Laura have an idea they share it and talk to people about it. They found that, “if you stop someone on the streets and ask them what are the biggest issues they are facing, you will realize that it’s the same across borders.”

Messaging is then built with their constituents’ help, not from a distance.

Thank you, Colombe Cahen-Salvador, Andrea Venzon & Laura Giani, for your time!

If you want to find them online and learn more about NOW! head over to their website.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

⁣

Realizing a global movement from scratch was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here.

“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. In serving her community, 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 housing and education, Ceyenne is investing in 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.

You can listen to the full episode here:

In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we share a framework to spark, stoke, and scale community. Ceyenne offers insights into each of the three steps: sparking the flame, stoking the fire and passing the torch.

A clear WHO and WHY.

From the onset of Ceyenne’s work, she was clear on WHO she wanted to support: Black transgender people.

The reason WHY she does this work is personal. She’s stepping into the role of “the parent that she desperately wanted as a child” by supporting and empowering others. Specifically, Ceyenne believes that “housing is healthcare.” Access to housing and education to housing can transform lives and society.

With a strong hunch about who G.L.I.T.S. wants to empower and why the community is organizing, they are better equipped to decide what dream to pursue together.

Creating structure with the community.

Once members move into their new homes, Ceyenne shared that the community’s social contract would be “developed by the community and not me.”

In designing these shared agreements with the community, Ceyenne is empowering both the members and leaders to create a home that feels like their own.

Vetting leaders.

Ceyenne talked about the rigorous application process her and her team are designing to find leaders who are going to live and help build the G.L.I.T.S. house culture with her.

“I’m going to want an essay to what leadership looks like,” Ceyenne explained. By having an application process, Ceyenne and her team identify who the excellent future leaders she’s seeking. These passionate, remarkable future leaders will fuel the broader impact of the G.L.I.T.S. community, extending the group’s reach well beyond the home they now share.

If you want to find Ceyenne online and learn more about G.L.I.T.S., head over to their website.

Thank you Najva Sol for bringing this story to us.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

G.L.I.T.S.: The story of a home 30 years in the making was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack, and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here.

“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. Nicole worked with a neighbor named Phil to host the first event in March of 2017.

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 across the threshold to activism.

Through the SameSide platform, this kind of accessible activism model reaches scale. SameSide offers hosts the tools to learn and take action on issues. A host’s job isn’t to be an expert; it’s to convene people around something they care about. The Standard Hotel is hosting pool parties advocating for gun safety. A woman celebrating her birthday wove in efforts to support ending the rape kit backlog in California.

We talked with Nicole about how she has empowered hosts with tools to gather folks around what they care about to take action.

You can listen to the full episode here:

In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we share a framework to spark, stoke, and scale community. Nicole offers insights into the third step: passing the torch.

Creating more leaders.

The role of a SameSide host is to be the “convener.” A host does not need to be an expert in a topic or issue, they just have to communicate that they care about it. Genuine passion attracts passionate people.

SameSide has found that at each event, two new hosts are generated because “people see somebody like them hosting or doing something that brings people together and they think, ‘Oh, I can do this with my book club’” or whatever community they are part of.

Supercharging leaders.

In service of the community, SameSides creates toolkits for groups gathering around different issues. Nicole’s team distills information and resources from frontline organizations who have had their boots on the ground for years doing civic work.

“One of the biggest barriers to our hosts actually doing something was that they didn’t feel that they could be a subject matter expert,” Nicole found. Toolkits are sent out to not only the leaders but each event attendee. It empowers the group to learn with one another and takes the burden off the host to be the expert so they can focus on being the convener.

Dialing up the participation

For many community leaders we work with, one of the greatest fears is: will anyone show up to my event? SameSide assures them that smaller events often leave room for intimate conversations to dive deep into issues of substance that affect people’s everyday lives. There’s real emotional power in that.” The emotional power carries into what SameSide set out to do: take action.

People often have a deep experience at events that moves them to take action in some form — sharing a resource, signing a petition, and communicating their personal experiences.

If you want to find Nicole online and learn about SameSide, head over to their website.

Thank you, Marjorie Anderson, “Get Together” correspondent, for bringing Nicole’s story to us.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

Supercharging the grassroots political action in our communities was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the “Get Together” podcast Bailey Richardson and I talked with Anna McAfee about the organic movement she sparked to connect the “people behind the profiles” on LinkedIn. At its height, #LinkedInLocal had more than 1,000 hosts leading events in 650+ cities across 92 countries.

Listen to the full episode here:

It brought me back to the early days at YouTube, when organic communities would spring up around the brand and we wondered how to handle it. I’m thinking of specifically the first time I heard about VidCon, YouTube’s creator conference. I remember that as a team, we initially kept it at arm’s length.

Part of it was wanting to see how it would turn out because they had big ambitions for the event. And the other part was this belief that the YouTube community is a self-made meritocracy that didn’t need us, as kingmakers, to thrive. In those early days, the brand felt like it had to take a backseat to what was happening on the screen. You could even see that in the design of YouTube — how generic it is and how it’s developed to let the creator do the talking and shine.

I feel like what happened with LinkedIn and #LinkedInLocal followed perhaps the same path, where initially the brand kept it at arm’s length and then gradually saw the value and wanted to get involved.

These kinds of real-world events and splinter communities, whether generated by the brand or by the community itself, are so integral to strengthening bonds and helping people feel more invested in the community that they are literally helping to build.

At this point, I think this kind of organic traction is something that any community manager would see as a sign of a community’s health — assuming that the entity upholds the same values.

So if you notice this happening in your community, I would say, embrace it! When I look at how Burning Man Project has navigated this, for example, their community grew out of a single event in the desert. They could have kept this exclusive but instead they encouraged people to take the principles and the cultural tentpoles and add some regional flair. There’s Fuego Austral in Argentina, Melting Man in North Dakota, and Kiwi Burn in New Zealand (to name a few).

It’s so cool — they each have different versions of “The Man” and the ritual burning of the effigy. By empowering the worldwide community, Burning Man Project helped turn a local event into a global community.

I would also say be really clear about what is and isn’t OK with regards to the usage of your brand. At Flipboard, we provided assets or guidance such that people could easily promote non-official events like a Twitter chat or conference talk. Or maybe it’s really important that the community not use your name or logo: that’s on you and your team to make super-duper clear with the community organizers.

Finally, send swag or figure out other ways to show these people some love! They are doing the good work for you. Think about how to say thank you, learn what motivates them, and give them more of that.

What Happens When a Thriving Organic Community Collides with a Growing Business? was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here.

“Leadership is actually the first few followers, not simply the 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 spending their after-hours training hosts 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 Anna on the “Get Together” podcast about creating a host community and the friction of an organic community working with a major brand.

You can listen to the full episode here:

In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we share a framework to spark, stoke, and scale community.

Anna offers insights into each step from sparking the flame to passing the torch.

Identify your “who.”

When Anna was working in recruiting, she learned many of the LinkedIn business tools. She turned to Sales Navigator to run a postcode search in her small city of 70,000 people, and identified that 23,000 had accounts and 280 were “active.” When she made her first post, inviting local folks to join her at a meetup, she knew that was the pool of potentials who might attend.

Even from that first post, local was “central to who we are,” Anna shared. “It’s where you’re going to find that face-to-face connection if you’re craving it. From a business perspective, it’s where you’re going to find new customers. A lot of businesses are largely dependent on local support.”

When Anna made that post and added the hashtag #LinkedInLocal, the local approach resonated in Coffs Coast and beyond. When Anna trained other city hosts, their “whos” remained consistent: business people who wanted to connect to their local communities.

Balancing inclusion and exclusion

Business networking can be exclusive. It’s often paid, invite-only, or behind the closed doors of alumni programs and clubs. When Anna and the co-creators of #LinkedInLocal defined core values early on, the first one they identified was diversity. “We wanted to be collaborative, not competitive.”

Subsequent values supported that perspective:

• Authenticity. The tagline for #LinkedInLocal was “get to know the people behind the profile.” Events encouraged conversation, not selling or shoving business cards in one another’s faces. They made the choice to have the events be free, underpinning the authenticity behind the events because hosts weren’t motivated by money.
• Respect. Events were strictly “pitch-free” to avoid the typical pitfalls of networking environments because Anna knew that LinkedIn had many people using it who aren’t salespeople.

“The values actually helped the growth,” Anna shares. Signaling strong values helped Anna & Co. pinpoint the right new hosts and ensure the experience scaled with quality.

Cultivating your identity.

#LinkedInLocal had to walk a tightrope with their identity between the organic community that emerged from within the platform and brand of a major public company.

So in trainings, Anna and her team had to be explicit with new hosts about not using the LinkedIn logo and making sure to state their event was not endorsed by LinkedIn. Rather this was a “user-driven community to get to know the people behind the LinkedIn profiles.”

Eleven months in, the LinkedIn team noticed and reached out. The early conversations were positive. “This was changing the way people use the platform. It was creating an enormous amount of very rich and authentic content,” Anna told us. The internal LinkedIn team explored non-financial ways to support the community (e.g. a #LinkedInLocal content filter and badge).

Two months later, the conversation shifted to focus on protecting the LinkedIn brand. Ultimately, #LinkedInLocal and LinkedIn never formed a partnership, keeping their separate identities and diluting the community’s momentum.

Supercharging Leaders.

After each training call, Anna and the team made sure to connect hosts regionally. When putting Florida hosts from Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Orlando in touch, for example, they began to see these people connect independently, attending one another’s events, and feeding off of each other’s enthusiasm.

“There’s something very powerful about chapter leaders knowing that what you’re doing in your city isn’t alone. To know that you’re a part of a bigger movement and a bigger impact.” Anna knew all along that creating a community amongst hosts would be crucial to their ability to keep the community vibrant and meaningful as it grows.

Ultimately when Anna and the founding team stepped away, their stewardship of the host community was what the #LinkedInLocal community lost. Participation has shrunk as a result. And it’s a tragedy. With adequate resources, Anna believes the #LinkedInLocal community could have grown to three times its size.

If you want to find Anna online and get in touch with her on LinkedIn.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

The organic movement that transformed LinkedIn was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here.

“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, men are socially conditioned to hold in their pain. The patriarchal structure turns a blind eye to the sexual experiences of men.

Because of his background as a storyteller, Onyango 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.

You can listen to the full episode here:

Note: we will discuss sexual assault in this episode and advise our listeners to practice discretion in tuning in.

In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we share a framework to spark, stoke, and scale community.

Onyango offers insights into the first step: sparking the flame.

Defining your why.

Through experience and education, Onyango developed a deep understanding of the space that he wanted to create so that he could work with others to realize it.

For him, the why was deeply personal and rooted in the reality of Afro Masculinity. It was clear to Onyango that mental health and sexual assault was not talked about amongst men and that needs to change.

His personal experience allowed him to understand that there was an unmet need for men in Africa with similar histories to his.

Shared activities must be purposeful.

The activities a community does together must realize its purpose. For Nyumbani, its purpose is offering emotional support to those who are denied it historically.

The healing circles that take place during the early days of a Nyumbani member’s time in the community tap them quickly into that purpose. Each member is invited to share their own story of sexual assault with the group. For many men who have experienced sexual assault, they live in an internal world that they do not know how to manage. A healing circle is the first time that many share their story and “it’s the first step to somebody getting free.”

Forging a Watering Hole

After experiencing sexual assault in his twenties, Onyango found sharing his story to be part of his healing. He created a Facebook, Twitter, and blog where he was seen and heard. “Finding online spaces where I could express myself was some kind of liberation.”

When Onyango made a call for men who had experienced sexual assault to join him in a WhatsApp support group he calls Nyumbani, he opened a door for others to express themselves. Two hundred people found him there.

Prompting storytelling and vulnerability.

Onyango had insight early on that, “stories are really powerful.” He started with the power within himself, telling his own story. “The fact that people cannot speak up about their own pain is my motivator.”

If leader’s like Onyango want their members to speak up about personal pain, they must do so themself. Leaders, even those with minor responsibilities, serve as role models for members.

Providing ground rules

Onyango was tasked with forging a space for members who “do not know what a safe space looks like because most of us actually have never even had one.” To create a safe space for people to show up as their full self, Onyango leaned on his experience from years as a mental health advocate and immersion in support groups. He laid out basic guidelines, then allowed the first members to decide on the rest, running the space the way they wanted it to run.

If you get in touch with Onyango, send him in email onyangohome@gmail.com

Thank you Whitney Ogutu, “Get Together” correspondent, for bringing Onyango’s story to us.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

Reimagining masculinity in Kenya and beyond was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more of the inspiring stories behind today’s thriving communities.

“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 creating a community.”

— Jodianne Beckford

Jodianne created Noire Girls Plants, “from a dark place of feeling numb.” At a low point, she found plants were giving 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 one, she created her own space. She put up an event and designed it with all the elements she would have wanted — yoga, spoken word, mediation, a plant gift and goodie bag.

People left that first event with more than just goodie bags and time well spent. People 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.

On the “Get Together” podcast, we talk with Jodianne about how she created her first event to explore her interests with others and what keeps her going through hard times.

You can listen to the full episode here:

While you’re listening, keep an ear out for three of our favorite insights from Jodianne:

If your community doesn’t exist, create it.

Noire Girls Plant was born out of a Jodianne’s own need for belonging, healing, and a space to nerd out about plants. After searching for an event that filled her needs and not finding one, a friend asked, “why don’t you host an event?”

Although she was convinced no one was going to come, she courageously decided to host it anyways and designed the event of her dreams. “I added everything that I selfishly would want at the event” — yoga, spoken word, mediation, a plant gift and goodie bag to take home. The event sold out with a waitlist. Tapping into her own needs struck a chord with others, helped her create space of belonging for them too.

In our research, a clear theme is that every would-be community leader is afraid that no one will show up to their shared activities. And the truth is that at first, maybe not too many people will. You’ll have to stick with organizing if you want your community to build momentum.

To overcome that fear of getting started, you can’t fake the funk. Spark your community from a personal place, just like Jodianne did. Ask yourself: What’s something you care about enough that you’d do it even if no one else joined? If you want to start a run club, for example, would you go on that run alone, even if no one joined you?

Balancing inclusion and exclusion.

Jodianne advertised her first event specifically to women of color. Not only was the event special because it brought a group of women together that all shared an interest, “it was really special to be in a room full of women that looked like me,” Jodianne shared.

Though centered on women of color, Jodianne kept her doors open to all. Eventually, a white woman and her 10-year-old daughter joined an event. Part of the conversation was centered around the lack of representation of black people being in the wellness space. The young white girl curiously asked questions and proved to Jodianne, “this conversation is definitely necessary because kids don’t even realize that [women of color also] belong in this space.”

A “why” that keeps Jodianne going.

Plants are a metaphor for the personal journey that people go on and share at Noire Girl Plants. For Jodianne, as someone who has experienced anxiety and depression, plants have offered new roots and room for growth. “I felt like I had to do this event for my past self so she could see me now thriving. And even though I’m struggling, I’m still pushing through,” Jodianne shared. “I didn’t want to disappoint the little me.”

Thank you, Jodianne, for your time!

If you want to find Jodianne online and learn more about Noire Girls Plant, head over to her website.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

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If your community doesn’t exist, create it. was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more of the inspiring stories behind today’s thriving communities.

“There’s strategic value in giving up some control when you’re a leader at a company if you do want new ideas to emerge.” — Steve Garguilo

Early in his career, Steve Garguilo 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 host something he’d loved in college: a TEDx.

He put on 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 sharing the idea, 90 coworkers 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 Steve had a new title: “Head of Instigation at Johnson & Johnson.”

Today, Steve continues this work. As a partner at Cultivate, he brings the transformative work he did at Johnson & Johnson to more organizations. He co-authored Surge: Your Guide to Put Any Idea into Action, which captures two-decade of insights on the quest to find better ways to take action on our ideas.

We talk with Steve on the “Get Together” podcast about how he pinpointed fellow changemakers within Johnson & Johnson and supercharged their ideas using the TEDx format.

You can listen to the full episode here:

While you’re listening, keep an ear out for insights on sparking change within your own company culture:

1. People want to connect to a greater purpose.

At Johnson & Johnson, Steve was tasked with creating products for emerging markets and was told by leaders that they wanted “new ideas and fresh perspectives of how we might do things differently.” Yet he found it was a challenge to actually break through with those new ideas.

Knowing the power the TEDx format had to amplify voices who have powerful ideas, Steve asked, “What might it look like to try to do something like a TEDx program inside of a big company? Would it have a similar impact?”

It did. More than 23,000 employees had participated by the time Steve left J&J.

Why did the TEDx format resonate so much? Sharing prepared ideas and research with one another was so exciting for employees like Steve because it was a way to live out Johnson & Johnson’s mission, which had attracted them to the company in the first place. And it allowed them to do so on their own terms.

2. Give people the chance to participate.

As a frustrated, passionate young employee, Steve could have focused on getting his ideas through to coworkers. Instead, he channeled his energy into building a stage for others to stand on. That decision to all others to participate made his efforts far more impactful than if he’d focused only on himself.

For example, one coworker who spoke at the first Johnson & Johnson TEDx shared an idea for how the company might diagnose depression through video game play. After the talk, people from different disciplines came up to her–clinical, supply chain, finance–and she was able to form a team to put this idea into action.

3. Changing a culture requires rallying changemakers.

Crucial to Steve’s efforts to scale TEDx to 23,000 fellow Johnson & Johnson employees was his instinct to find and empower fellow hand-raisers at the company–folks he calls “cultivators.” These are the people who, like Steve, “get up every day feeling committed to the purpose of the big company they work at.”

When Steve works with big companies today, he hunts for changemakers at the organization. As he says: “These people are the key to all the locks.” If you can find your company’s purpose-driven employees, support them to realize their ideas and connect them to other changemakers around the organization, it’s what “unlocks” culture change. As Steve said, “Everything that people talk about — culture, employee engagement, retention and all these big buzzwords — can be unlocked through cultivators.”

So how do you find your fellow changemakers?

Put out an invite, see who responds and who offers to help.

“If you want to get more people to come out of the woodwork, the best thing that you can do is just be one yourself,” Steve shared with us. At J&J, Steve communicated who he was and what he cared about, then hosted events around that passion that attracted people like himself.

Thank you, Steve, for your time!

If you want to find Steve online and get in touch with him, head over to his website and learn more about Cultivate.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.

To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”

We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.

Instigating grassroots culture change at the world’s largest companies was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.