Community Archives - Connecting the Dots

If sometimes, the places where we acquired most of our connections are not available, or can’t, provide us with meaningful connections for our current moment of life.

In some cases, something in our life changes. We move to another town…or we change our status quo. All of a sudden, our previous hubs for connection may not nurture the new person we became.

Sometimes we just want to expand our horizons and make friends that will bring something new to our life…or maybe we are nurturing a new part of us that doesn’t feel seen in the circles of connections that we currently have…

Whatever the reason, sometimes we feel the need to expand our circle of connections away from our comfort zone. I have felt this need a couple of times in my life, even though I have a wonderful and eclectic circle of friends. I have compiled a list of organizations and movements – many of them are present in several places in the US, and some are worldwide and accessible online from anywhere – that aim to provide just that. Try them out and let me know what you think!

Internations – it’s a community designed for expats (people living outside their own countries), but they are friendly to locals too, should you be interested in connecting with people from all over the world. They are present in all large capitals of the world, including NY, Miami, Los Angeles, and several middle sized cities like Austin, Fort Lauderdale, etc. They provide groups of interest like book clubs, running, nature, travelling, exploring the arts, etc. www.internations.org
Circling –
Turquoise Table
MeetUp groups
Mighty Networks
Sparked games
7 cups
The School of Life
NextDoor
Authentic Games
The Wanderful Blog
The Village by Happily Family
Listen.ly
Insight Timer – it’s an app, but it also fosters community in an otherwise very lonely activity: meditation. It allows users to send a “thank you for meditating with me”. In my personal experience, it has helped me stay on track with a habit that is otherwise so hard to bond upon when done from the loneliness of your home.
The Hub – it started as the first co-working created for social and non-profit ventures, but it became strong as a community for them. It will be interesting to see how they will keep going post-COVID. I would guess that working in their community side may keep them afloat while many of the for-profit co-workings will find it hard to do the same…
Network after Work – it is a community based on your professional needs, but it can help entrepreneurs meet and exchange ideas
CMX Connect – the premiere event and platform (called Bevy) for community builders, it is mostly a business endeavor. It is a good resource for those that are interested in building a community and want to learn how businesses do it.
A Small World – granted, exclusivity is not the best premise to build inclusion…this online community wants to create the no.1 exclusive community. It’s partially contradictory value proposition has shown challenging, even from a business side…
Tea with Strangers – small groups of people meet for tea and have meaningful conversations. It was still only physically in New York, but after COVID, meetings were moved online, so you can, at least temporarily, taste their project from afar. www.teawithstrangers.com
The Dinner Party – dinner for those who have lost someone. www.thedinnerparty.org
Creative Mornings –
Table talk – a conversational game, with questions that help players open up about deeper topics, hosted by someone more experienced that explains how the game works. www.table-talk.org
Neighborhood Table –
Neighbor watch –
Life Boat – a duo of friends, Tim Walker and Alia McKee, that found themselves ‘mired in a mid-life friendship slump‘. It has great resources, like a study in the state of friendship in America, and a guide on how to improve the quality of your friendships. www.getlifeboat.com
you tell me! If you find a community that could be here, contact us! We’ll promise to not only publish it, but also give you credits (if you so wish!)

The author, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the 19th Surgeon General of the United States, aims to raise awareness to maybe the largest public health problem the United States faces today, one that is both at the core of other major health problems (from the Opioid Crisis to the increase in suicide rates) and is also surprisingly overlooked: loneliness.

He does that through a tour of all the faces that loneliness presents in our lives, giving a special place to its hidden aspect, in the first Section, and then proceeds, in the Second Section, to present loneliness’ antidote – connection – through a sequence of concentric circles, from the individual to larger and larger groups we belong (family, friends, and outer groups).

To expose all this content, Dr. Murthy chooses the storytelling approach, jumping from one person’s narrative to the next, connecting those that crossed his path in his journey from unawareness of the issue as a shared one, to the discovery of the initiatives that are popping around the country to tackle the problem of a lack of human connectedness.

The book’s main quality may also be its major flaw: it reads as a fluid report of a journey, through the voices and lives of those that were also touched by the challenge of loneliness. It’s a narrative, not a manual. So, maybe my major issue with the book was one of expectations: I was expecting a clear list of practical solutions at the end of the book, or at the end of each chapter. He does provide excellent examples of pioneers that aim to tackle isolation through offering alternative connecting solutions, but due to its narrative style, they are embedded in the body of the narrative and hard to be used as a quick guide.

In retrospect, I think the book does very well what it intended to do, and there is still space for content that enumerates possible solutions to the problem of lack of connectedness in a more straightforward way somewhere else. In fact, it propelled me to start this blog, to provide just that: a report on possible ways to tackle the challenge of the loss of connection in our post-pandemia world, reviewing each of these initiatives, one at a time, in an easy to consult way.

So, if you are here for the same reason I was reading Dr. Murthy’s book – namely, to learn about all possible projects you could potentially try – I encourage you to read the following posts:

If you want to look at a complete list of every community or movement I’ve researched that is doing any of the things I’ve mentioned, you can read the post A complete list of Communities that foster Community;
If you want to deepen the way you connect, read the post How to bring your power of connecting to another level;
If you want to connect more with yourself, in other to better connect with others, read the post Connecting with yourself in order to better connect with others: the How To.