Get Together

“We lack language for describing the ache when we crave for companionate emotional connection, for that friend bond. Whether it's an ache for a single close friend or a group of friends. I gave it is ‘platonic longing.’” - Kat Vellos Kat Vellos is a user experience designer who uses her trade to help people connect authentically. After moving to the Bay Area 6 years ago, Kat for the first time found herself struggling to make adult friends. She felt, as she describes it, a “platonic longing,” and decided to use her skills as a user experience designer to make friendship more “user-friendly.” The result of this research is her new book  We Should Get Together, which tackles the four most common challenges of adult friendship: relocation, full schedules, the demands of partnership and family, and our culture’s declining capacity for compassion and intimacy in the social age. When the pandemic caused social isolation, Kat released an addendum to her book, Connected from Afar, which offers six months of weekly connection prompts that you can use to nurture your faraway friendships. In addition to her work designing, researching and writing, Kat is also a community builder. In her early days in San Francisco, Kat created an event called Better Than Small Talk to break through the wall of small talk and get into real, heart-pumping, mind-sparkling conversations. Kat also sparked the Bay Area Black Designers community, which is described as “Silicon Valley’s largest unofficial ERG for Black designers.” She started with five or six other local designers in her living room and now has over 500 members providing professional development and community for Black designers, in particular those who know how isolating it can be the only Black designer in a company or design team. On the podcast, we talk with Kat about cultivating deep friendships in a sea of busy, mobile people and sparking community in otherwise isolating situations.👋🏻Say hi to Kat and grab a copy of her books here.📄See the full transcriptThis podcast was created by the team at People & Company. 🔥Say hi! We would love to get to know you.We published GET TOGETHER📙, a handbook on community-building. And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

“Every party needs a host. Every team needs a coach. It's no different online than it is in our real world communities.” - Lindsay RussellAt Facebook, Lindsay Russell was a part of the team that used data to identify, validate and supercharge the company’s biggest community building investments to date.  In their research on what makes a Facebook group active, even vibrant, Lindsay. and her team realized that successful groups had one clear commonality: a remarkable admin. These admins were spending hours every day running the platform's most engaged groups, where users were talking about everything from infertility and miscarriages, to gender politics in Nigeria, even dog spotting and cruise-going. That core insight led Lindsay and her team to spearhead a novel effort within Facebook’s walls: investing in the community of power admins who were essential to the product’s success. If the groups team wanted to supercharge their product, they’d need to supercharge these power admins–empowering more of them to fulfill core tasks for their groups. With the help of power admins, Facebook groups would affect more people and sustain itself longer than the product and marketing Facebook teams at HQ could have managed on their own.In this episode of the “Get Together” Podcast, we sat down with Lindsay to learn more about her experience spearheading Facebook’s big pivot towards supporting communities. What can we learn about building successful groups from her research?  What investments helped community leaders spark and stoke their communities? Tune in for more.👋🏻Say hi to Lindsay on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/lindruss📄See the full transcript🔎Checkout our case study on Facebook's power admins with lessons from Lindsay and the team that supercharged Facebook Groups.This podcast was created by the team at People & Company. 🔥Say hi! We would love to get to know you.We published GET TOGETHER📙, a handbook on community-building. And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

“It's important that people realize that extraordinary women are not just the heroes of the past, but they are around us every day today. They are already part of our communities. We just need to look a little deeper and more carefully, but they are already there.” - Elena FavilliElena Favilli found herself at the center of an all too familiar story of women in the startup world. She was in Silicon Valley working on her company Timbuktu and finding it hard to make friends with investors, get support, and raise money as a woman. From that pain point, she made it her mission to contribute in her life to gender equality. Elena began researching gender representation in children's books to start. After observing her favorite children's stories, she noticed they all centered around male characters. She asked the bold question: what if this was different?  Elena started a newsletter called “Who Framed Cinderella: Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls,” where she promised each week to showcase one story of an amazing woman like Maria Sibylla Merian, a 1700s scientist and artist who discovered the metamorphosis of butterflies (before that people thought butterflies appeared out of mud like magic!). She sent out the first newsletter to 25 friends and received eager responses for more stories like Maria’s. So each week she continued to tell stories of historical figures and contemporaries until she reached 4,000 subscribers. With an audience behind her, she launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a book that quickly exceeded her $400,000 goal climbing to a total of $1.2 million in funding, breaking a record as the most crowdfunded campaign in literary history.Rebel Girls shifts a narrative by spotlighting real women as the heroes and showing kids that women can do amazing things just like men. Elena published Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls with the help of 60 women illustrators around the world and a sequel with crowdsourced stories from dedicated readers. We talked with Elena about how she used crowdfunding to gauge interest and how she has collected contributions from readers, telling the story with her audience. 👏Learn more about Elena and Rebel Girls at: www.rebelgirls.com/📘Pre-order Rebel Girls' new book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Immigrant Women Who Changed the World✨Learn more about our correspondent Maggie Zhang on her blog, CommonplaysThis podcast was created by the team at People & Company. We published GET TOGETHER📙, a handbook on community-building. And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

“I think that there's just some stubborn part of me that wants benevolence towards strangers to be more accepted and widespread. That's my underlying mission.” - Ivan CashIvan Cash is an interactive artist and filmmaker whose work celebrates and inspires connections among strangers. He has received high accolades for his work (Forbes 30 Under 30, Cannes Lions Shortlist, exhibitions in V&A Museum and The Brooklyn Museum). But that’s not why we interviewed him on the podcast. We brought him on the podcast to go deep on the techniques he uses to connect strangers through art.  Ivan is one of the creatives we admire most who use storytelling and art to actually bring people together, connecting strangers through small, benevolent collaborations that add up to much more. His first community art project, "Snail Mail My Email," invited volunteers to transform strangers’ emails into handwritten letters, free of charge. In the six years it ran, 2,000 volunteers sent 29,249 letters to 80 countries. From there, he launched  The Passenger Project, connecting strangers sharing the same plane, and Selfless Portraits, which gave strangers permission to draw each others’ Facebook profile pictures.Recently, Ivan released “A Social Distance,” a film that features a montage of people living in countries most impacted by COVID-19 and was viewed by people around the world.We talked with Ivan about turning an idea into a project, setting constraints to foster group creativity, and engaging people who care as collaborators.👏Learn more about Ivan and check out his projects at: www.ivan.cash✨Learn more about our correspondent Maggie Zhang on her blog, Commonplays.This podcast was created by the team at People & Company. We published GET TOGETHER📙, a handbook on community-building. And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

“Every piece that's knit is 20 to 30 hours of somebody thinking about climate. And then every person who sees that piece thinks about it and hopefully talks about it...It's activism, but sort of a cozy activism, a “craftivism,” that's not too threatening to people and permeates conversations and dialogue about climate change.” - Justin Connelly and Emily McNeil Knitters have been doing temperature knitting for a long time--checking their thermometer on their porch every day, writing down the information, and turning data into patterns for a particular year or time period. But today there is a growing movement of turning these crafts into political statements. Justin Connelly, Emily McNeil, and their co-founder Marissa Connelly have codified this practice into a shared framework and language that cohesively illustrates the history of climate change. They call their efforts the Tempesty Project. The project started in 2017 as a DIY guide for activists and knitters to extract and preserve environmental data in the form of scarves and wall hangings. Local knitters were eager to get involved in the project but not as excited about extracting the data. So, Justin, Emily, and Marissa created a kit with data and let the knitters do their knitting. Two-thousand people have purchased the kits and are spreading the story about climate change with colors. Groups in local churches, classrooms, college campuses and towns have weaved years of history, some as far back as the late 1800s which is on display at the Philadelphia Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. By banding together, what would have been an isolated experience of climate transforms into a collective language for activism and environmental change. 👋🏻Check out the work of the Tempesty Project at www.tempestryproject.com/✨Say hi to our correspondent, Mia QuagliarelloThis podcast was created by the team at People & Company. We published GET TOGETHER📙, a handbook on community-building. And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

“Mom, Dad, Uncle, Auntie, Grandfather, Grandmother: We need to talk.You may not have grown up around people who are Black, but I have. Black people are a fundamental part of my life: they are my friends, my classmates and teammates, my roommates, my family. Today, I’m scared for them.” - Letters for Black LivesIn 2016, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man in Minnesota, was shot by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. Philando’s girlfriend streamed the aftermath on Facebook Live and incorrectly identified the police officer as “Chinese.” Christina Xu, a 28-year-old Chinese-American, tweeted a call for other Asian Americans in support of Black Lives Matter. She encouraged them to talk with their families about why they stand in solidarity with other people of color. Sparked by this tweet, thousands would convene online to collaboratively write letters about anti-Blackness  to their elders in 23 languages. They called the effort Letters for Black Lives.When the death of George Floyd reignited an urgent conversation around Blackness in 2020, Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani and Hema Karunakaram raised their hands to push the project forward. Adrienne, a first generation Iranian-Ameican, started to rewrite the original 2016 Letter for Black Lives as a guide for conversation with her family. She revisited the Letters for Black Lives Slack group and asked if anyone would want to join her in this effort. Hema was one of the members of the group that volunteered again.  We talked with Adrienne and Hema about what it was like to collaborate with hundreds of people from around the world to come up with one clear message and bring this message to life with their elders. 👏Learn more about Letters for Black Lives at: lettersforblacklives.comThis podcast was created by the team at People & Company. We published GET TOGETHER, a handbook on community-building:  And we help organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.Hit subscribe🎙 and head over to our website to learn about the work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

“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 ShahMotivated 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/

“It's not that introverts don't want to talk to people. They really value quality conversation over talking to big quantities of people. [Silent Book Clubs] appeal because you can get that little bit of conversation about something that you're interested in. You don't have to come up with small talk. That appeals to the type of person that appreciates that mix, and I think most people are kind of ambiverts.” - Laura Gluhanich Laura Gluhanich and Guinevere de la Mare are the type of people who always had a book in hand and enjoyed reading in public spaces. But they shared a mutual frustration for the traditional book club. These sessions were often hard to schedule, and many times required reading a book that wasn’t of interest.  So to satisfy their desire for social reading, they got creative. They transformed frequent dinner outings in their San Francisco neighborhood into a shared time for quiet reading. They called their rendez-vous a “Silent Book Club”and it became a ritual for the two friends. Soon, other friends started to tag along and they began formalizing the invitations with Facebook events. Then came a series of infection points–people reaching out in Alabama, Japan, Serbia, Italy, the UK and more to start their own Silent Book Clubs, features in NPR and Oprah magazine—that brought them to 220+ chapters today.Our correspondent Mia Quagliarello talks with Laura about how she and Guinevere learned from their careers in online community building to make an assertive stand with their community guidelines. She talks about how they, as a team, have documented dream partners, personal values and deal-breakers, that have served as an underlying shared basis for decision making. Together they have continued the Silent Book Club as a global passion project with the support of volunteer hosts on the side of day jobs, Laura as the Director of Programs at Him For Her, a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on the corporate board, and Guinevere de la Mare as a UX Writer at Google. Find more stories from community leaders who are passing the torch and supercharging their leaders.👏Learn more about Silent Book Club and say hello at https://silentbook.club/✨Say hi to our correspondent, Mia Quagliarello, and checkout her work with Flipboard and the Burning Man Project . 📙Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building 👋Say hi and learn more about work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations.

“I always believe that when you present yourself in that deeply vulnerable, authentic, personal place, almost always people meet you there.” - Pei-Ru Ko When Pei-Ru Ko was recovering from an autoimmune condition, she spent a lot of time at farmers markets in the Bay Area and grew close to local food producers. Relishing the relationships she built with them, she saw the opportunity to bridge a gap between food producers, sometimes lonely from their isolating work, and eaters, like herself, who wanted to trust and better understand the food system.In summer 2014, she hosted a night rich in food and stories, packing 45 guests into her living room to learn about sustainable seafood. Since then, the community has grown to thousands of people attending their events and listening to their stories over the years. This year, Pei-Ru passed the torch to Jovida Ross as the new executive director. Together, they are elevating stories from the entire food chain and reweaving connections in the food system.In this episode, Pei-Ru and Jovida share the power of storytelling to bring people together, how to create a space for generous listening, and why food plays an important role in building a community. Hear more from other community leaders about stage 3 in getting your people together, 🔥Pass the Torch.👏Learn more about Pei-Ru and Jovida and say hello at https://www.realfoodrealstories.org/✨Learn more about our correspondent Maggie Zhang on her blog, Commonplays.📙Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building 🔥👋Say hi and learn more about work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations, visit: http://people-and.com/

The excerpt below was originally sent out via our Get Together newsletter. You see the original post here, and sign up to receive the newsletter going forward here.Our small team is working on what long term changes we make to take a more anti-racist stance and start dismantling white supremacy that we have been complicit with in the past. Below are a few immediate People & Company commitments and asks where you can plug in. (And, at the very bottom of this email we’ve included a shortlist of resources and opportunities to support the Black Lives Matter movement.)1. Refocus our office hoursWe’ve set aside 5 office hours per week, every week, over the next quarter for current and aspiring Black leaders to talk through community projects (of any type) as well as non-Black leaders to strategize around bringing people together to combat racism (in small and big ways). If this is you, contact us here.Note: We have a backlog of office hour requests. If you already applied and haven’t heard back, we’ll review shortly and prioritize office hours with folks who fit this criteria.  2. Shift who we interview on our PodcastSo far ~13% of interviewees on the Get Together podcast have been Black leaders. Shout out to these inspiring friends 📣! Going forward, we are committed to amplifying more Black voices and their stories. Over the next six months, a minimum of 30% of who we feature will be Black leaders.We’re working on how we adapt our process for sourcing stories. But immediately, if you know someone who would make a great podcast guest, we want to hear about them! Please tell us about them here, and share the form with your friends.   3. Bring on a "Get Together" podcast correspondent to help us signal boost Black leadersYou may have noticed that we just started to bring on podcast “correspondents.” One of our first new correspondents will help us reach our goal for shining a bigger spotlight on Black leaders who are building all types of communities.If you’re keen, or you know someone who would be excellent at telling these stories (no podcasting experience necessary!), please send us their name. Email bailey[at]people-and[dot]com4. Up the diversity among our collaboratorsFinally, we’ll work actively to increase the diversity in our pipeline of contractors who form the small nucleus we started building with this year.For now, if you’re an audio engineer/editor, workshop facilitator, or anyone else reading this email and would like to collaborate with us, please reach out.Thanks for listening. Thanks for speaking up. Take care of each other 🙌.