A New Year's wish + invitation
Thank you for being a part of our Community Threads family! Having this space to share with you all and reading your emails about what you’ve gleaned from these newsletters have meant the world to me this past year.
So as we close the chapter on 2024 and enter 2025, I wanted to share with you a new year’s wish + invitation:
"The art of gathering" and the importance of grounding people in their purpose
Have you facilitated a meeting before? Or hosted a party?
What runs through your mind when you’re planning a gathering?
Why we need to tell more stories
I’ve always loved stories - reading them, writing them, dancing them, hearing them.
One of the greatest joys of my work these days is partnering with community coalitions to tell their stories and the stories of their community members.
Narrative - that is, storytelling - holds immense power. Just in the last couple weeks, this has come up in three completely different projects PoP Health is working on:
The perils of trying to be everything to everyone
I was facilitating a coalition meeting recently and the conversation ended up going in circles for a bit - someone would propose an idea for a message or an activity and someone else would respond explaining why that wouldn’t resonate with or convince members of their community.
After a few rounds of this, someone interjected with a powerful idea - it’s one I’d heard before and you likely have too, but it bears repeating: Let’s say 20% of the community are strongly with us and 20% of the community will always be against us, no matter what we do. That leaves 60% - maybe we can focus on them instead of the 20% we’ll never be able to sway.
Leveraging the power of in-person gathering
I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of in-person gathering on the professional end as well. After a long summer vacation, this Fall has been a period of reconvening in person.
Last month, we had an in-person kick off for a DC School Behavioral Health Consortium that drove home the energy and sense of community that can come simply from sitting around the same table. I also loved the icebreaker the meeting conveners used to set the stage for our time together - they shared a collage of different images representing collaboration and asked each person, as we went around the room for introductions, to share which image resonated most with them and why. What a great way to orient the group to the reason we had come together and unearth some key distinctions and nuances in how each person at the table might approach this work. We’ve gotten used to “setting the stage” activities in virtual spaces, but they are just as valuable in in-person gatherings.
Just do it. Then iterate.
Whatever idea you’ve been mulling over, considering, planning for…just do it.
Now, I know it’s not that simple (in most cases).
Maybe you can’t "just do it” because you don’t have the authority. Or because you need to assess the potential consequences. Or any one of a dozen other perfectly valid reasons.