Resolutionize Your Community Involvement
On doing whatever it takes to just get started right now
✨ Thank you for reading GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here. Scroll to the end for GET INVOLVED BUTTON, a coworking event next week to get started on a community practice.
On Saturday I tabled for the co-op at the Hobby Fair, one of my favorite events of the year because it is basically just a club fair for adults. We met people who just moved to town and had questions about how safe it is to bike in New Haven (not that safe but we have thoughts), people coming from 45 minutes away wanting to find their people, people who live down the street from our space who want to volunteer. Like any club fair it helps if you have candy but we are never that organized. Everyone passed by a “New Year, New Hobby” sandwich board propped up in the freezing cold as they entered the pride center, a phrase piggybacking on the fresh momentum of the new year.
Hours later, I got home and learned about the murder of Alex Pretti and it felt like someone grabbed my heart and spiked it down into the floor. The urgency to get involved with something, anything, has never been higher and the ante keeps upping each day. The very best stories from Minneapolis have been from neighbors getting together in formations new and old: rapid response networks, neighborhood groups, parent groups and pantries and small businesses and churches. I keep thinking about how this scale of resistance looks more like a response to a hurricane than any political response I’ve ever witnessed, and it’s because people are activating within diverse, decentralized networks offering everything they’ve got and are trying new things every single day.
Moments like this one stoke so many feelings that are also at odds with each other: fury and fear, urgency and confusion, hypermotivation and crushing self-doubt. I need to do something but am I ready for it? I want to get involved but does it even matter? I must act but is this thing the right thing to do?
I think we need any boost we can to claw out of this inertia and into our sense of agency. From Anya Kamenetz: “You don’t have to feel empowered to act. You have to act to feel empowered.” And while there’s a lot to hate about the crossover of self-help culture into community building, some days I like to think I can turn the tables and reclaim part of it for myself, like building my own Terminator out of parts scavenged from the robot wars.
Resolutions are one of these things to steal.
Resolutions are something I’ve previously hated on as a framework for community involvement because of their extremely high likelihood to fail. This remains true. Anyone who has ever vowed to lower their screen time knows this. But they’re also a great way to begin, a well-worn neural path normalized by millions of us who have no hesitation saying I want to try this thing and here is how I plan to do it. Why is community building and local action such a comparatively hard nut to crack? If we can figure out how to meditate why can’t we learn our neighbors’ names?
There are two parts to approaching our participation in this way:
Shifting our understanding of local action as something worthy of our complete and loving focus, like strength building or wellness or creative practice. It elevates the act of knowing your neighbor or joining a local group as holy. As something as sexy and cool and rewarding as doing our first pull-up.
Finding the right container to approach it in. Only you can know how motivating something will be for you to start, but you’ve got about a billion resolution templates to choose from once you begin. Like less/more but make it about your neighborhood, a bingo card of a bunch of different acts of service, 75 hard but about going to a different meeting every day (ok this sounds like hell but you know what I’m getting at!)
Consider this earthshattering video by linda nguyen lee where she vlogs her personal challenge to either a) go to one volunteer event a month or b) face the consequence of donating $50 to a non-profit. Genius. Lifechanging. Makes me want to do it too.
Because that’s the thing! It isn’t just about the resolution framework, it’s about resolution culture. It’s the tectonic shift of community participation as desirable and possible, not obligatory and amorphous.
Imagine if we developed any commitment to volunteering, organizing, joining, showing up, and treated them the way we do resolutions, like:
Talking about your commitment with other people, like truly being loud about your plans to distribute warming kits to neighbors who need it or honing your own conflict management skills and bringing it up as much as you would your failed attempts at learning Spanish
Dragging your friends along to a meeting or training with you
Writing it down and slapping it on your wall. Imagine how cool “KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS’ NAMES” will look on your wall even after you’ve done it! And how frightening it will be for your neighbors to see when they come over for coffee!
Hosting events or gatherings dedicated to the idea of doing anything in your community, like the Hobby Fair I mentioned or even just doing a roundtable with a few friends where you share groups to get involved with (or attending this upcoming GET INVOLVED BUTTON coworking event next week!)
Tracking your streaks and total progress i.e. 3 volunteer shifts so far this year, 4 weeks of grocery assistance
Creating stretch goals that are intentionally unsustainable, like rejection therapy challenges that teach you something about yourself or get you a lot of information in a short time to adapt into an ongoing commitment
Opening up about your journey with others and sharing tips and being proud and honest about what’s easy and what’s hard or which groups have the best snacks. In that video from linda nguyen lee, she also shares honest reviews about her volunteering experience which has people in the comments asking how they can get involved and offering other ideas.
Failing at it or having a bad time and coming back anyway
Maybe you are already locked into your local activities. Maybe you don’t have the luxury of choosing whether to start or not because active crisis is already at your door. Maybe you are reading this in the future and it’s June and the new year’s shine has long since come off the calendar apple. Resolution culture might have something to offer us anyway; a framework to just start so can develop a longterm commitment. A small shift to normalize participation and take others along with you.
Margaret Killjoy on what she heard on the ground in Minneapolis:
“Last year, with the growing crisis of fascism, more people started throwing events for their neighbors, just to get to know each other.
Person after person talked about the George Floyd uprising of 2020 too, about the community networks people built back then. It’s not like people set up networks and kept them super active, but connections can lay dormant for years and then re-emerge.”
Everything you do in your town to build relationships, offer service, and participate is a penny in the jar and a seed in the ground. It is never about one big push but hundreds of little daily attempts and us trying out any tactics we can to loudly, reliably, inspiringly begin.
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On that note, maybe this is the perfect moment to devote some time to getting started. Might I show you the way to GET INVOLVED BUTTON next week?
GET INVOLVED BUTTON: COWORKING TIME TO BEGIN YOUR NEXT COMMUNITY PRACTICE
Friday, February 6th // 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
Learn more details and register for free right here.
💸 If you enjoyed this, consider dropping a buck in the GROUP HUG hat! I’m so excited to try this new alternative to paid subscriptions (which have been paused for a while anyway) to pass support from this newsletter onto groups in my town which I clearly draw all of my inspiration from.
The reframe of local involvement as something equally worthy of resolution culture is genuinely clever. What stands out is how much the barrier isn't capability but the permission structure we give ourselves to start messy and iterate. I tried someting similar last year with a monthly meet-a-neighbor commitment and it changed the texture of living here way more than any skill-building habit ever did.
Lovely! I signed up!!