What a little "social courage" can do: Connecting strangers through tea time 🍵 Ankit Shah, Tea With Strangers

“If you're going to lead an organization, it's likely that more of your time and energy is going into building an engine and less of your time and energy is going into facilitating connection between people. It's really important for community leaders to recognize if they want to lead an organization or if they want to facilitate connection.” -- Ankit Shah

Motivated by a sense of nostalgia during his senior year of college, Ankit Shah posted an open call: he wanted to get tea with anyone on campus who he hadn’t met before. To his surprise, 250 University of Pennsylvania students said “yes” and he found himself spending the last 6 weeks of college meeting with six new people for three hours every night in the same cafe. 

He realized that strangers were excited to meet and learn about each other beyond surface day-to-day interactions. After graduation, he founded an organization called Tea with Strangers, which paired strangers together for small group conversations. Since its founding in May 2014, it has brought over 50,000 people in 25 cities together. Today, Ankit has brought this community-first mindset to his work at Facebook and Airbnb, and also to his personal life, creating Silent Hike Society and weekly neighborhood gatherings.

In this episode, we learned about how Ankit grew a global community of hosts for Tea with Strangers, how he translated his learnings into a career, and the value of alone time as a community-builder.

Hear more stories from community leaders like Ankit who are passing the torch and creating more leaders at: https://gettogetherbook.com/resources#pass-the-torch

👏Learn more about Ankit and say hello at https://www.ankit.fyi/

✨Learn more about our correspondent Maggie Zhang on her blog, Commonplays.

📙Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building 🔥: bit.ly/gettogetherbook

👋Learn more and reach out about the work we do coaching passionate, community-centered organizations like Nike, Substack, and Surfrider at http://people-and.com/