Ode to the Get Involved Button
Two words and a menu
✨ Thank you for reading GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here. Register for a free co-working sesh on Friday, January 17th where all are invited to take action and begin your next community thing: fill out the volunteer interest form, reach out to the local organizer you’ve been meaning to say hey to, fill out your calendar with cool things coming up near you, THAT SORT OF THING. Fun! Cool! How will it go?! No one knows! Hopefully well! More details at the bottom of this email.✨
I’ve read the mission statement
The theory of change and all about the history and the recent posts about that coat drive or planning meeting or call for stories
And I’m in, like all in
It’s no big deal, but every hope and dream I have ever had converges into an electric point on my forehead
I want to be part of this
Thank goodness something like this exists
I was just thinking about this yesterday
How am I not already a part of this?
And there you are
A pill-shaped button! A dropdown menu! The last pullaway tab fluttering on the waterstained flyer stapled to the telephone pole
GET INVOLVED
GET INVOLVED
GET INVOLVED
Donate, volunteer, join the board, download the toolkit, go to a meeting, become a member, sign up for the newsletter, intern, sign the petition, donate food, interpret, host, start a chapter, plant an olive tree
Future, better, hotter versions of me start to float around my head like little birds
One where I’m a volunteer
One where I’m in the text threads
One where my heart feels bigger
One where I am helping future me’s join, those clueless idiots, just kidding
You are so much potential
You are maybe good UX design
But you are mostly just the result of the same exact invitation
Worded the same exact way
Passed between thousands of projects and clubs and orgs until you have been smoothed into recognizable shorthand we may all zero in on after finding the website
Two words and a menu
Joy and obligation
Friendship and annoyance
Being needed and needing everyone else
More emails in my inbox and numbers in my phone and squares on my calendar
How would I ever begin without you,
Dear Get Involved Button
or simply click that ₊˚.⋆⁺₊💜₊˚.⋆⁺₊ at the top if you indeed liked it, we always appreciate that here at group hug hq!! love to you all
GET INVOLVED BUTTON: COWORKING TIME TO BEGIN YOUR NEXT COMMUNITY PRACTICE
Friday, January 17th // 8-9am PT / 10-11am CT / 11-12pm ET
Have you had a local org’s volunteer page open for months on an ancient tab? Been meaning to reach out to a Highly Cool Person (HCP) who could be your future collaborator, friend, or volunteer buddy? Is that interest form open? That half-typed email? Your mouse hovering on the Get Involved button?
Begin the new year by getting your next community practice started. “Community practice” is word salad for: volunteering! hosting! organizing! participating! donating! Doing any of this with organizations, collectives, friends that you want to build something with.
Part accountability space, part coworking, all first steps.
This is devoted, self-directed (i.e. you already know what you want to do) time for:
Filling out volunteer forms
Identifying who you want to get involved with
Learning about orgs and projects near you
Writing emails to people you want to meet + collaborate with
Developing your own project/gathering/collective
Working on something for a group you already belong to
WHAT WILL IT BE LIKE?
We’ll take action on what we’ve been meaning to take action on – in silence – but together! The hour will start with arriving into the zoom room and sharing intentions in the chat. Everyone is welcome to continue using the chat for inspiration, blocks, and questions on their mind. But we’ll mainly be heads down, getting started. At the end, we’ll share what we got up to and folks are welcome to unmute and share if they’d like. There will not be a talk or teaching. The vibe is more: come use this dedicated space to do the thing you have been meaning to do. There is motivating, inspiring magic in working on the same things in silence with other people who are all committed to the same thing as you are, and that’s what we’ll tap into together!
LINKS ‘N THINGS
A Room I Could Belong In – loved loved this story from J Wortham about their experience across different recovery group spaces
Kinda fascinated by the tone of pieces like Third Space? You Can't Handle a Third Space and I’m Starting to Think You Guys Don’t Really Want a “Village” which, as you can probably tell from the titles, punctures the performance of our desire for community by laying out all the ways we act in opposition to actual interdependence. The essays themselves make great points about bringing our action in alignment with what we say we want. Still, interesting to see the emergence of this sortof “gotcha” style; a little part of me worries that some people are closer to believing the impossibility of any of this [flaps arms] than they are to believing in it, and this sort of discourse only confirms their correctness even if the content tries to point to something braver, but what do i know!! I’m just a girl!!
Board Watcher Bingo from Libraries for The People – love games as a way to build attention and criticality around something new, like attending a library board meeting
You don't need to "fill your cup first" to seek or be in community – “My relative isolation & lack of community in this new city heavily contribute to my exhaustion. Sometimes, I logically know that nights like this are when I need connection the most.”
An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping is a gorgeous, grounding book
The Meaning of, and In, McDonald’s – an amazing follow-up to this piece about McDonald’s as a thriving social space “As to the larger question, how is it that McDonald’s, a business founded and designed to make eating as quick and transactional as possible, become America’s default community center? It has became that because people are fundamentally social and meaning making, and having a community you feel you belong to is foundational to who we are, and so if you provide them with a landscape of banal franchises, they will form communities, and make meaning, in a banal franchise.“ Also related: this previously shared piece on commercial third spaces being a dying breed, mainly focusing on the interior design of places like Starbucks making it physically impossible to connect together
💜
I love the Encyclopedia of Radical Helping so much that I became their Canadian distributor because I couldn't buy a copy here! It's soooooooooooooo thilling and delightful.