When Friends Become Co-Organizers
Or collaborators or coworkers or housemates
✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here.✨
Okay do you remember that feeling in middle school or high school where you’d be sitting with your buddy, and your teacher would be teeing up a new project for everyone to work on, and you’d lean closer to your friend as if that would fuse your bodies together thus making you more likely to be paired up, and by the grace of god you indeed were PUT IN THE SAME PROJECT GROUP and then…and then.
You’d begin to work together. You’d realize, with a shiver, that the Working on a Project Friend was unrecognizable from your Do Nothing But Make Silly Little Jokes Friend. Maybe they were Type A+ and made the strict kind of project plans that got you dizzy. Maybe you both did this annoying thing with your voice or eyebrows when you got into “work mode” and this was maddening.
I am maybe hyperbolizing history but I remember some friendships just being fundamentally altered after coming back from a group project. We now carried the dark passenger of knowing how impossible we both were to work with.
Some (I) might say it is literally no different as adults. The stakes are just higher. (Great!) You are likely working on something more meaningful than a diorama and also covet your relationships more than ever; it’s 2024 y’all, we can’t be playing fast and loose with friendships in this loneliness epidemic!
At my bike co-op, my best friends are people I am also on the board with, participate in working groups with, hold some power to hire or fire or change compensation of, and volunteer alongside for events, shop hours, and meetings with funders or new volunteers.
When it is going well, it feels like the best version of community. There is fluidity. We move with ease between making stupid jokes and adjusting a line in the budget for the new fiscal year. We get things done and help a community space be awesome for another day and love each other in the process at birthday parties and through break-ups and shooting the shit on each other’s couches.
When it is going poorly, it terrifies me. I worry that I will lose friends. I struggle to maintain the objectivity needed to make good decisions for the space even if those decisions might hurt or alienate my friends in the meantime. It becomes harder and harder to not let the dismissive thing someone said in a meeting chew away at my golden idea of them as my friend.
Even if you don’t have as entangled a situation as this one, we still negotiate these friendship thresholds all over the place. And this is a great thing! I want to live in a world where we have friends who become housemates or roommates or intentional neighbors. Friends who become fellow volunteers after you decided to go help out together or both got pulled into door-knocking in your neighborhood. Friends who become coworkers after you sent them a job listing at your org. Or friends who we make music and art with, start businesses with, or honestly just co-host birthday parties with! (The co-hosted birthday party is a thing of high stakes!)
Creating something with a friend opens up a new portal into one another; it tests trust and makes more trust, exposes wild skills you had no idea the other person had, cuts out so much explanation if you’ve got a shared language. At its best and simplest, it makes the thing you’re working on more enjoyable.
But I fear this delicate friendship dance is yet another one of those things we expect to be great at without acknowledging how we literally practice it nowhere else, because of how everything in our world is built for individualization and atomization and bailing when the feelings get too hard.
And maybe all this overlap sounds like your nightmare. Some of it sounds like mine. I think this is fine. We all have our things that might actually be worse-off with the added dimension of closeness. Scenarios that benefit from solitude or that “fresh start” feeling where you can just show up to something where nobody knows you at all. But it makes me wonder when the intimacy of friendship actually sweetens our relationships, and thus our work, in collaborative contexts.
Anna Fusco writes about this threshold with her landmates:
“I listen attentively and hear of job offers and rejection letters, of break-ups and sick parents, of travel plans and terminal diagnoses. I find out where the wildflowers are blooming and which campgrounds are still closed by way of somebody’s recent escapade up the coast. We remember who we are to one another; the bridge to compassion is maintained with each anecdote. I’m less likely to get pissed about a dirty sink if I know somebody’s heart is broken, or if the deal at work didn’t go through.”
I’m still grappling with what it takes to move between these states of friendship and other types of collaboration together, but for now all I know is this: we need to acknowledge that we are, in fact, moving between two relational states.
Maybe that acknowledgement is just for ourselves to notice or it is something we articulate to the other person. It is a pause, a shift, a breath between roles.
It could be as simple as creating a threshold – “I’m putting on my [insert other role] hat here for a second” “If we’re thinking about what’s best for [shared thing you are working on], maybe we could..” (This truly sounds awful when typing it but I have tried this once or twice and it has sort of worked.)
Or intentionally building in moments to show up as our selves “outside the work” – energized, broken, tired, unexpectedly giddy. How that affects our ability to participate.
Taking a break from the spaces we share entirely every now and then.
Or making sure we are nurturing our friendships just as much as the thing we are doing together. French fries after the meeting, walks where you vow not to talk about The Thing, cookie drop-offs or a card that you slip into their bag just because.
When the times are good, maybe none of this is necessary. But when they’re not, I always find myself wishing I had put more intention into it all. The stakes – our friendships, and how wonderful it feels to build something beautiful with people you adore – are just too great to fumble.
Are Commercial “Third Places” A Dying Breed? – I’ll be the first to tell you about the life-altering conversations I had at Cinnabon as a fifteen year old
Put Your Chairs in the Front –
inspired me to create a pop-up front porch at the co-op this summerBirth, Death, and Rebirth of First Friday – the history of Santa Cruz’s distributed art walk that goes from sock shops to bars to actual museums but also automotive shops (something I didn’t expect to miss so much after moving)
Libraries: The Best Form of Government – “Our governmental structures and agencies should not be in the service of business, or violence, but rather should exist to facilitate all of us providing each other with what we need to survive and thrive.” from
Decolonizing Design Community of Practice - Got to meet Kāvya recently and loved learning more about this space of practice
Bumble Buys Geneva in a move to center the app more around friendship-making (because everyone is celibate now??)
Essential Partners + YMCA partner-up to become “conveners for community-led dialogues” – this idea of convening frameworks being grounded in networks of physical space all around the country is super exciting to me!
- Talking About Friendship in
I will say: 1) I have one best friend whom I never, ever send job postings from my work even when they are looking and the posting is in their field because I know I would never be able to negotiate having this person in work-person form as my colleague. They might think this makes me a bad friend, if they knew. But I know deep in my heart it is to preserve our friendship! Or at least my stake in our friendship. And 2) making experimental theater with my group of grad school friends and our former grad school instructor and trying to create a company together was, like, the very best and the very hardest thing. Exactly for all the reasons you describe.