Introducing THE HEARTH

Reflections on the pilot and plans for next time.

The pilot episode of THE HEARTH felt exactly how I hoped it would: convivial, relaxed, and experimental :-).

A lovely group of people, with a wide range of community building ideas, came together to discuss bringing people together.

They indulged my first draft format and then gave super helpful feedback, which enabled us to come up with a much better structure for next time (see below).

We started by collectively generating a list of discussion topics by submitting top of mind ideas to “THE HAT”. The very vague brief was: “questions/ideas/thoughts you have about community building”. Here’s what came out of it:

THE HAT

1. How to consistently grow and bring in new people?

2. Getting people who aren’t in the meetup sphere into the face-to-face gathering network.

3. Trying to link up and connect and even merge the face-to-face gathering network

4. Alternatives to meetup.com

5. Criteria for a good philosophy group

6. I’m thinking of creating a group that involves some kind of physical movement and wellbeing

7. How to get community members to help spread the word & grow the community

8. Community is defined by unity. The people within usually have similarities, but not always.

9. To charge or free?

10. Innovative ways to build connection. E.g. playfulness

11. How to strike the balance between depth and lighthearted vibes?

12. Balancing repeat attendees with new joiners

13. How to build lasting and deep connections between strangers that last beyond events and continue “in the real world”?

14. Can you really build community in transient London?

15. What is true collaboration? As opposed to tokenistic collaboration.

If you have new topics you’d like to add to “THE HAT”, please leave them in the comments below.

NEXT TIME:

We will split the evening in two and focus our discussions on:

• one practical issue (e.g. venues, marketing, communication between events) and

• one more philosophical issue (e.g. purpose, leadership, ethos, what we mean by community).

For each discussion:

• we’ll start by crowdsourcing ideas

• go deeper in small groups

• come back to the big group for reflections

There will also be opportunities for storytelling, trouble shooting, and celebrating existing communities.

The rest of the evening will be unstructured space to continue conversations, discuss collaborations, and get to know each other.

15 or so seems to be a fairly ideal number of people to make both small groups and a big group discussion possible, so we will keep the event limited to that for now.

And I will ensure we have our 5 min break(s) ;-)

Any thoughts/things I’ve left out, please let me know in the comments!

Here’s the link to join next time:

Looking forward to seeing you there!