Community Lore
How do we share our past, present, and future?
✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG. So glad you are here. ✨
When I used to profile community arts spaces as my Exceedingly Normal Teenage Hobby, I was obsessed with their stories. I wanted to know everything: who founded it and why, how they made decisions, what was hard, what inspired them to keep going despite that hard stuff, what insane dreams they had for the future.
But most of all, I loved getting physical evidence of all that experience.
I’d step into their space – a stage or studio or collection of chairs looming dark and quiet at the back of the room, a light reek of mildew and body odor from whatever happened the night before – and someone would pile my arms high with goodies of all kinds: founding charters, zines, manifestos, stickers, meeting notes, strategic plans, posters, chapbooks.
In that magical pile was a story. A traceable thread through their history, the present, and future. It was awesome.
It became a sort of yardstick in my mind for other community experiences that I’d host or participate in; if a stranger walked in today and tried to get a sense of this community, would they be able to get it? Or in online lingo: imagine explaining this to an alien/pilgrim/etc.
One way we can get at this is by looking at the balance of community moments and activities.
Another way to slice it is by looking at your lore – how your community shares your story with newcomers, and what reinforces that story every day – in the balance of time itself. Across the past, present, and future.
These might be tangible resources, like a welcome booklet or zine or flyer of upcoming events. They could be digital, like an About page on your website or an archive of gatherings and meeting notes. They could also be more intuitive experiences, like what you talk about and how often, and the intangible culture of a place.
Here are some ways we might bucket these activities across time:
🦕 The Past
How do you show your community’s origin story? How did you get here? What were the people, places, ideas, that shaped it all?
👉This could show up as: your origin story, alumni lists, timelines, storytelling, nostalgia, traditions, rites of passage, mentorships, retrospectives, reflective activities
✨The Present
How is your community experienced today? How do you gather or offer resources to make your vision felt?
👉This could show up as: gatherings, activities, relationships, theory of change, programs, SWAG/merch, the “day-to-day” stuff that might always be true and core to what you do, onboarding, welcoming, alignment and shared vision/values, check-ins/surveys to pulse check, maps like the one at the top of this post
🔮 The Future
How do you share where you want to go? Why does it matter? What will it look like or require to arrive there?
👉This could show up as: strategic vision, advisory boards, calendars, growth paths and new opportunities for everyone, financial goals, new partnerships
[Free Worksheet] If your love language is worksheets, you can jot down which experiences fall under each Time Bucket™ here.
You might then consider a few questions:
Are you showing up in one area more than another? Is that intentional? What impact does that have? For example, if you have a ton of resources that support The Past and Present but less about The Future, maybe your community could use more clarity on where you’re headed and why. Or maybe that’s exactly where you intend to be! Cool!
Is there a structural reason why you might be indexing in one way? I.e. is there so much turnover you can’t archive well? Or are you so stuck in the present that it’s impossible to pull your head out to look to the future?
Is there balance in the formats of how you share your stories? Is 90% of your storytelling happening on Instagram? What physical handouts or in-person experiences support your story?
I filled out an example for the dance class I used to run with my amazing friend Jamie Keil called Power Prance. It was an amateur dance class for adults and we would practice choreography to jock jams and it was awesome, and small, and lasted six perfect months.
Looking at this, I might notice that a lot of our archiving of the past happened on Instagram, and if you weren’t experiencing a class in person or following us there, it was hard to get a sense of who we are and what we were about. Maybe we could have added a lightly culty way to initiate first timers. Also we probably could have definitely used merch.
It also makes me think about so many spaces I’ve been a part of – workplaces, clubs, committees – where The Past was so suffocating, it felt impossible to imagine The Present or Future. There was more nostalgia, more doing things “because that’s how we’ve always done them”, more tenured voices listened to than rooting choices in the people and experiences happening in the present day.
I’ve also experienced the reverse; where the obsession with reinvention and novelty is so intense, we forget to learn from our past, lift up the voices of those who came before us, and pause to reflect on why we’re here in the first place. (Somehow both of these examples seem to represent…the US… right now??? fascinating)
Every person, new or tenured as can be, deserves a way to understand and contribute to community lore. The way we make that felt is up to us all, together, in the stories we tell, models we scribble out on napkins, and scrappy websites we build. But they are choices. Are we making them with intention? Who feels represented and welcomed by this lore, and who gets left out?
What if you shared this with someone who has some community lore up their sleeve?
💫 Bike Bus. Mainly Bike Bus. I especially love that the TikTok comments are all like prosaic FOMO i.e. “imagine the breeze of a brisk fall day, pedaling near your best friend on your way to school” like, wow!! I love when a community experience like this is so moving it taps right into our heart.
✨ Why Being A Person of Place Matters. “Becoming a person of place makes long-term investments desirable, because the future becomes more valuable to you. Those who have committed to a place, an ecosystem, a community, feel those as an extension of themselves. They cheer for their place like a favorite sports team, they envision its success beyond and after themselves.”
⭐️ Pony Sweat fiercely non-competitive dance aerobics. You can go in-person in LA like I used to or rent videos from home like I did last week! The most magical, the most cathartic!
I am searching for a dance space in New Haven so that I might revive Power Prance on the #east #coast and I thought it would be fun to document my process here. I feel less connected to arts stuff locally than I was in Santa Cruz so it feels like a funny little case study on how to make fun community stuff happen where you live when you’re building connections from “scratch”. JOIN ME IN THE HUNT!
Googling dance studios in New Haven turns up bleak results of spaces that haven’t made a new post since 2019. So far, I reached out to the Arts Council to see if there are any secret dance studios they’re aware of. They have a spot called The Sandbox that they offer to incubating programs (very cool) but sadly no mirrors there which is a must in my mind. They recommended Q House, a very cool (recently re-opened) community space on Dixwell. I might reach out to them, but it feels very legit (they have Zumba! do i deserve to share a space with Zumba?!) and I might keep digging to see if I can find something more low-key.
hope you find that space to prance homie!