Get Together

If you're on the internet or if you're working in design today, you may have heard of Carly Ayres (@carlyayres). She's full of personality, sharp ideas, and has an alluring rebellious vibe.  Carly's designs are not of the polished, precious, or minimalist ilk we've become accustomed to. Her work is interactive, it's dynamic, and it's sincere. If you want proof, visit her website CarlyAyres.com. It is a Google Doc.    Almost five years ago, Carly started a community in Slack called "100s Under 100," a play on the Forbes "30 Under 30" list and other similar awards. The Slack group brings together a vetted collection of designers, everyone from senior creative leads at big companies like Dropbox to high school students looking for feedback on their college applications. "Hundos" feel they are on the same team, sharing resources, insights, and feedback in what can otherwise be an isolating profession. (Full disclosure: Kevin Huynh, my partner in People & Company, is a "Hundo.")   We wanted to ask Carly about this special Slack group because we get questions about community "watering holes" all the time. People want to know what platform they should use to bring their people together online. Or what they can do to actually make a digital space engaging. Carly has figured all of this out and more. How did Carly pull it off? We sat down with Carly in our office in the Lower East Side to learn more. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙 Get Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?

"The most surprising thing for me was how many people showed up on day one. And that continues to be the most surprising thing - that people are still showing up on day 300. Every time a stranger comes, I'm just like, where did you come from? It is amazing, and it's a huge motivator to keep me going." - Aria McManus Aria McManus, an artist and creative director, started Downtown Girls Basketball in 2013. From the beginning, it was a team for women and people who don't identify as male "who are specifically bad at basketball." At the first practice, 30 of Aria's artist and designer friends rolled out to play together. They had so much fun, Aria hosted another game the following week. In the six years since, that core group has ballooned to a rotating crew of 400+ of women (including Bailey, this show’s host). Every week they come together to get exercise, revive their love for basketball, and, most importantly, goof off with other creative, playful women. How did Aria build something so special? What makes her approach to women's basketball different from other leagues and pick up games? What keeps her going six years down the road? We sat down with Aria in the Lower East Side to learn more. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙 Get Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?

*“The film was made in this amazing period in YouTube’s history where we were focused on how we could demonstrate the ways in which technology can be both innovative and net positive—how it was driving new ways of storytelling and building community.” - Sara Pollack * This episode we talk to YouTube's first film community manager, Sara Pollack, to learn more about a film YouTube made called "Life in a Day." On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to create Life in a Day, a cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. All in all, 80,000 submissions containing over 4,500 hours of footage from 192 nations were edited into one 90-minute film of raw, first-person scenes from real people around the globe, echoing the experience of YouTube itself. To bring cohesion to the submissions, users were given a range of prompts from “What do you love?” and “What do you fear?” to “What’s in your pocket?” to respond to with their footage. Since the "Life in a Day"'s debut on the site in 2011, more than 15 million people have watched the film. (You can still watch it there today.) How did YouTube come up with the idea for the film? How did they get the word out to YouTubers and to the world? Why did they create a film in the first place? We called Sara to find out. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙 Get Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members? Subscribe to our podcast for more great stories like this one.

*“Every single time we go out there, we're looking to make a connection with people-to make people feel like they came to the right place and that they can carry that forward. A critical number of people have shown us or told us that what we're doing is important to them and that keeps us going.” - Nobu Adilman * In 2010, Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman posted on Facebook asking if anyone wanted to sing in a choir with them at a real estate office where a friend worked in Toronto. He and Daveed prepared some minor arrangements to "Nowhere Man" by The Beatles and "Just A Smile" by Pilot. "It was kind of extraordinary what happened that night. People we didn't even know showed up," Nobu told us. At the end of the evening, people wanted us to do it again the next day. Choir! Choir! Choir! was born. They ended up hosting the Choir! every Tuesday for the next year. To participate in a Choir! Choir! Choir! event, you simply show up to their venue, pay five dollars for a lyrics sheet (more if they're touring), rehearse a three-part harmony, and then perform it with a crowd of strangers. Many of their videos have gone viral, from Prince and David Bowie tributes, to sing-alongs led in-person by famous musicians like David Byrne, Rufus Wainwright, and Patti Smith. In our interview, we ask Nobu about how Choir! Choir! Choir! went from something he and some friends started in a real estate office in Toronto to the phenomenon it has become. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙 The Get-Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?

"These communities feel magical, but they don't come together by magic. Someone has to take the first step. " - Kevin Huynh This is a special episode. Today I'm interviewing our very own Kevin Christopher Huynh aka "Coach Kevin." Kevin's my co-host, biz partner, bud, and one of the most admirable, fun souls I've met on this planet called Earth. We're talking to Kevin today about his coaching. Nearly every work day for the last month and a half, Kevin has taken at least one coaching meeting with a nascent community leader. In total he's had 3 conversations in 35 work days, and he's now totally booked through March. (If you want to book a session, reach out here!) These are not hypothetical communities. These are real groups of people who are actively getting together. We're talking about people like → Krystie, Kat, Kasey from Slant'd Media - an Asian-American media company that gets writers, photographer contributors brought into the fold and hosts events. Kyle from Innerglow - one of the most diverse meditation communities in New York City. Lynn from Homoground - the longest-running queer music podcast with an engaged community of listeners, many of whom don't have access to a queer community near them. I ask Kevin about what he learned from all these conversations. It'll just be us chatting. If you want to read more of his insights, you can check out his post on research.people-and.com. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙

"Why join Surfrider? You’re going to have friends for life. I hear people say this is the best thing that they’ve ever done, and that’s pretty amazing. Beyond all the good work we’re doing, there’s that human element that’s probably equally valuable." - Dr. Chad Nelsen, Surfrider CEO If you’re a surfer, you probably know the Surfrider Foundation. But if you don’t know them, you’re in for a dose of inspiration in this episode of the podcast. The Surfrider Foundation was formed in 1984 by a handful of surfers who gathered together to protect their home break in Malibu, California, from development and pollution. Now there are 190 Surfrider chapters and clubs and over 500,000 activists and supporters worldwide. These chapters share resources, insights, and form coalitions to push forward the same purpose: protecting the world’s ocean, waves, and beaches. We spoke to Dr. Chad Nelsen, the CEO of Surfrider. Chad started working at Surfrider when he was 28 years-old and fresh out of grad school. At that time the foundation had just six employees and 20 chapters. In our conversation Chad shares what they’ve done to expand the organization and its impact—an artful blend of refining their strategy, structure, and storytelling and keeping a sense of fun at the center of what they do. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙 Get Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?

"Running uptown isn't normal, especially our kind of social running. You might see one middle-aged white person running along Riverside Drive on a long run, but you never saw anyone running on Broadway, Amsterdam, or Washington Avenue. So when people started seeing a big group of us running, it’s very, very different from what they’re used to." - Hector Espinal, WRU Crew Growing up in NYC’s Washington Heights neighborhood, Hector Espinal never imagined he’d one day become a runner. “I've never played any sports. All the men in my family are really into sports but me, so I’ve always kind of been the black sheep,” Hec told us. And looking back, he and his friends felt like their neighborhood discouraged a healthy lifestyle, with fast food joints on every corner and few public spaces to play in. To motivate himself to get fit five years ago, Hector Espinal would invite everyone he knew to join him on runs. Hec stuck with it week in and week out, and soon he had a group of regulars joining him. Today We Run Uptown, or WRU Crew, the run club Hec started, meets every week, even through the dead of winter. As many as 100 diverse runners gather at the same spot in Washington Heights on Mondays at 7:00 pm then take to the streets to hoots and hollers of support from folks in the neighborhood. How did Hector build something so special? We sat down with him in Central Park to learn more. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙 Get Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?

"The Get-Together" is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?In 2009, Todd Bol erected the very first Little Free Library book exchange in his front yard in Hudson, Wisconsin. Crafted from an old wooden garage door he didn't want to throw out, Todd built the little library as an ode to his late mother, a schoolteacher and lifelong reader.Todd watched as the simple concept resonated with his neighbors. Soon people were asking Todd for their own little libraries. By the time of Todd's death in October 2018, there were more than 75,000 registered Little Free Library book exchanges around the world in 88 countries.To learn more about how Todd's simple idea turned into a global movement, we caught up with Margret Aldrich, who leads Marketing & Communication for the organization and authored *The Little Free Library Book*.🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙

"The Get-Together" is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members? In this episode we interview Dan Madsen, the secret sauce behind the Star Wars Fan Club and the first Star Wars Celebrations. After a fan zine he created as a Denver teenager was noticed by George Lucas himself, Lucasfilm asked Dan to help them. He was tasked with “[keeping] Star Wars in front of people. I had to keep it alive and vibrant, keep the excitement up,” Dan told us, and man did he nail it. Dan took over the Star Wars Insider magazine, growing it to 500,000 subscribers at its peak). Eventually he also took the reins of the official Star Wars Fan Club (growing it to 180,000 members), ran a $20 million collectibles business and hosted the very first Star Wars Celebration, bringing tens of thousands of Star Wars fans from around the world together for the first time. In our interview, we ask Dan about his lifelong devotion to Star Wars and its fans. We’ll dig into how Dan made that first Celebration a success, and also about how he grew his relationship with Lucasfilm from that first zine to a global fan enterprise. 🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙

*"Whenever we're vulnerable, it enhances our ability to connect."* - Lola Omolola, founder of FINThe Get-Together is a podcast about the nuts and bolts of community building. Hosts Bailey Richardson and Kevin Huynh of People & Company ask organizers who have built exceptional communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to thousands more members?In this episode, we'll speak to Lola Omolola about FIN, the private Facebook group she started for Nigerian women. Today, FIN has 1.8 million members and gets hundreds of post applications every day. The Facebook group is managed by 10 volunteer moderators.But how did Lola get the first conversations started? How did the first members find out about FIN? We called her in Chicago to learn more.🔥 Check out our book Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People 📙