Get Together

Note: we will discuss sexual assault in this episode and advise our listeners to practice discretion in tuning in.

“Everybody's story is valid. The fact that people feel they cannot speak up about their own pain is my motivator.” - Onyango Otieno

At twenty years old, Onyango Otieno was the victim of sexual assault and found he had no where to turn. In Kenya, as in many other societies, the patriarchal structure turns a blind eye to the sexual experiences of men. Men are socially conditioned to hold in their pain.   

Because of his background as a storyteller, Onyango instead began writing about his experience. In sharing his story on Facebook and Twitter, he found “some kind of liberation.”

Onyango continued exploring African masculinity and advocating for mental health, and eventually put up a post sharing that he was starting a WhatsApp-based mental health support group.

Over 200 people raised their hands to join him there. 

Onyango put these folks into two groups and offered some basic community guidelines that allowed members to define the space the way they wanted. Today they call these groups Nyumbani, which is Swahili for “home.”

We talked with Onyango about structuring a community support group starting with community guidelines and his personal self-care as he leads people to unpack trauma. 

Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:

• Sending a signal. Onyango sent a call for men who wanted to join a support group.
• Watering hole. Gathering on WhatsApp and creating community guidelines.
• Healing circles. A participatory shared activity where men share stories of sexual assault, often for the first time.
• Self-care. Onyango’s practices to check in with his emotions.

👋🏻Say hi to Onyango ([email protected]) and learn more about Nyumbani

✨Say hi to Whitney Ogutu, “Get Together” correspondent.

📄See the full transcript.

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.

“Listeners should expect refreshing and new voices from me. The plan is to put Africa on the map.” - Whitney Ogutu

In the middle of July, we announced that we were searching for a new podcast correspondent to  help us expand the stories we tell. We had an incredible response to the program–117 applications! We decided in the end to bring on not just one, but two correspondents: Marjorie Anderson and Whitney Ogutu.

We’ve been training Marjorie and Whitney over the past few months on our editorial voice, how to do outreach, how to interview, and to edit, and we’re excited to share that they've recorded their interviews. 

In advance of hearing her first episode, today we will introduce you to the cerebral, sincere, kind-hearted Whitney Ogutu who comes to us from Nairobi, Kenya. Whitney leads Community Engagement and Programs at Mettā Nairobi, a community, and innovation hub that supports startups, entrepreneurs and innovators. 

She is an investor in people and their potential, which she traces back to her first memories of local chamas, a Kenyan community format for brainstorming and taking actions on local problems.

Over the next few months, Whitney will be sharing stories of community leaders on the podcast but first we wanted to share hers. 

👋🏻Say hi to Whitney on Twitter.

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.

"I kept doing events after that first one. I guess that became my community. Even now saying it out loud, it is very strange. I never thought I could be someone that would be a part of like creating a community.” - Jodianne Beckford

Jodianne created Noire Girls Plant, “from a dark place of feeling numb.” At a low point, she found plants were givinging her joy. She searched on Eventbrite and asked around, trying to find a space with others to nerd out and talk about plants with.

When she couldn’t find the space she craved, she decided to create it herself. She stood up an event and designed it with all the elements she would have wanted--yoga, spoken word, meditation, a plant gift and goodie bag. 

People left that first event with more than just goodie bags and time well spent. Attendees both had fun and saw each other, as people of color, being vulnerable. They asked, “when’s the next one?” and so Noire Girls Plants began--a community of growers, in aspects of health, prosperity and nature.

We talked with Jodianne about how she created her first event to explore her interests with others and what keeps her going through hard times.

Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:

• Origin story. How Jodianne found and gathered people around the healing power of plants.
• The first event. Designing for the event for your first member--you.
• Language. Jodianne’s use of nature as a metaphor for mental health.
• Going virtual. Hikes, Mother’s Day virtual potting events, and shared activities at a social distance.
• Dealing with adversity.  Jodianne keeps showing up to do this work for “the little me,” to show her she doesn’t listen to the “no” voices in her head.

👋🏻Say hi to Jodianne and learn more about Noire Girls Plant. She also has a podcast, The E Project which explores the ‘Epiphany’ moments that lead individuals to do what they love. 

✨Say hi to Marjorie Anderson, “Get Together” correspondent.

📄See the full transcript.

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.

“Community doesn't require that you have the same opinions. It just requires that you share a passion.” - Marjorie Anderson 

In the middle of July, we announced that we were searching for a new podcast correspondent to  help us expand the stories we tell. We had an incredible response to the program–117 applications! We decided in the end to bring on not just one, but two correspondents: Marjorie Anderson and Whitney Ogutu.

We’ve been training Marjorie and Whitney over the past few months on our editorial voice, how to do outreach, how to interview, and to edit, and we’re excited to share that they've recorded their interviews. 

In advance of hearing her first episode, today we will introduce you to the playful, diligent, sunshine-energied Marjorie Anderson. By day she leads the community at Project Management Institute. In the evenings, she runs her own community and blog, Community by Association. 

Marjorie, in her words, “makes a great dinner party host but a terrible dinner party guest.” While  an introvert, Marjorie is an orchestrator of connection with a gift for bringing people together.

👋🏻Say hi to Marjorie and learn more about Community by Association

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.

“There's strategic value in giving up some control when you're a leader at a company and you want new ideas to emerge.” - Steve Garguilo

Early in his career, Steve did the (seemingly) impossible—he led a grassroots transformation of the culture of Johnson & Johnson, the fifth largest company in the world. 

Frustrated by the pace and challenges of big company culture, Steve decided to do something he’d done in college: host a TEDx.  He hosted a casual TEDx event at a bar and invited employees within Johnson & Johnson to share their research, wild ideas, and learn from one another. Within an hour and a half of posting the event internally, 90 people had signed up. Soon employees at other offices around the world wanted to host their own. By the time Steve was done, 23,000 people at Johnson & Johnson had engaged in a TEDx and he had a new title: “Head of Instigation at Johnson & Johnson.”

Today Steve continues this work shifting big company cultures from the ground up. As a partner at Cultivate, he’s taking the transformative work he did at Johnson & Johnson to other organizations. He co-authored Surge: Your Guide to Put Any Idea into Action which captures the two-decade on the quest to find better ways to take action on our ideas.

We talk with Steve about how he pinpointed fellow changemakers within Johnson & Johnson and supercharged their ideas using the TEDx format. 

Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:

• Start with “why.” Aligning behind a shared purpose.
• Do something together. The steps Steve took to host the first TEDx at J&J.
• Metrics of success. Shiny eyes and goosebump moments.
• Pinpointing cultivators. Finding other people that have energy to spark change.
• Leading authentically. Being the person that you want more of in the world.

👋🏻Say hi to Steve and learn more about Cultivate.

📄See the full transcript and annotate insights.

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.

The Dinner Party is a worldwide community of 20- and 30-somethings who have each experienced the loss of a loved one. “We know what it’s like to lose someone and we aren’t afraid to talk about it,” their website states.

Before the pandemic more than 400 Dinner Party tables were regularly meeting in nearly 100 cities around the world. Carla and Lennon share in this episode how they have through the age old practice of breaking bread, Dinner Partiers are transforming life after loss from an isolating experience into one marked by community support, candid conversation, and forward movement.

When COVID-19 arrived in March, in-person dinner parties were no longer an option and the organization made a shift to video calls. Since then, they have added 70 new tables and launched a buddy program.

You're invited!

On Friday November 20, 2020 Bailey and Kevin of People & Company host a live interview with Carla Fernandez, co-founder, and Mary Horn, community manager, at The Dinner Party to learn about how the community has transformed since the pandemic. 

Grab a ticket 🎟

• Who: You! Leaders, community builders and other people navigating how to bring your people together.
• What: Following the live, 30-minute interview, we’ll have a town hall discussion to learn from each other’s responses to the pandemic.
• When: Friday November 20th 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM PT / 12:15 PM - 1:00 PM  ET
• Where: Private Zoom listening room
• How much: $15 to register.
  $5 from every ticket donated to The Dinner Party to support their mission to transform life after loss.

Grab a ticket 🎟

“If there's drama in your life, you don't want to talk about it. It’s hush, hush. But that's not the way you heal. It's been detrimental to our communities. So when people–especially a lot of black women—saw that representation on camera it just touched them in a way that just exploded.” - Kibi Anderson

Many of us may know “Red Table Talk” as the TV show that Jada Smith, her daughter Willow, and mother Adrienne host. 

What you may not know is that Red Table Talk sparked thriving grassroots communities of viewers. Women in cities around the world started their own “Red Table Talks”—literally dressing their own tables with red tablecloths and gathering with strangers to experience the honest conversations that the Smiths role model on the show for themselves. 

Kibi Anderson is an award-winning Emmy producer and the former president of Red Table Talk. She was first a fan, drawn in by the raw conversations. We talk with her about the grassroots community that formed around the show and how she used her business savvy and inherent passion for community building to supercharge their efforts.

Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:

• Can’t fake the funk. Kibi’s shares how she grew up in community.
• Role modeling difficult conversations. How Red Table Talk maintains the integrity of initial conversation.
• Supporting an existing community. How Kibi and her team acknowledged, supported, and supercharged the leaders of their community.
• Building with. Experimenting on then launching new tools and content with your community members.
• Celebrating. Bringing “OG” members close to the RTT team and creating private, special content for their most passionate members.
• Hurdles. The challenges of not owning a channel (Facebook) and thus not being able to communicate seamlessly with the community.

👋🏻Say hi to Kibi Anderson and learn more about Red Table Talk.

📄NEW! See the full transcript and leave thoughts, learnings, and insights in the comments plus respond to others. 

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.

“You don't have to have any talent. You just have to come out. I design things that would work for someone who was a lawyer or a school teacher.” - Charlie Todd

In August 2001, Charlie Todd moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy. He didn’t have immediate access to a stage, so he started creating in public spaces by staging undercover performances. 

Charlie documented his first undercover performances on a blog he called Improv Everywhere. Over the past two decades, Charlie has staged hundreds of “missions” involving tens of thousands of undercover performers and shared them on YouTube, garnering millions of views. Highlights include making time stop at Grand Central Terminal, a mass no-pants subway ride, and letting random strangers conduct a world class orchestra in the middle of Manhattan. Do yourself a favor, check out their YouTube.

These pranks are not traditional improv. They require significant logistical work on Charlie’s end. He creates the "sandbox" for participants—first friends from his early comedy career in NYC and now thousands of people who have signed up for the Improv Everywhere mailing list—to play in, exercising their own creativity. 

We talked with Charlie about crowdsourcing the creativity of strangers to create in his words “a happy mob.” 

Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:

• Commanding attention. In comedy, it’s easy to get a laugh out of negative material, pointing the finger at a victim. Charlie does the extraordinary to live out the golden rule, “anything you perform should be something you want people to do to you.”
• The “why” for participants. In it for the fun of it.
• Crowd control. Managing an email list of thousands and knowing how many people to tap at one time.
• Power of YouTube. How YouTube created global reach for Improv Everywhere connecting them with new performers and opportunities.
• The “why” of the leader. How Charlie’s motivations have shifted over the past 19 years.
• Space. Public space as the key element to the Improv Everywhere experience.

👋🏻Say hi to Charlie Todd and see the Improv Everywhere missions in action on YouTube.

📄See the full transcript 

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.

You can tune into the original episode on the Masters of Community podcast.

Special thanks to David and his team for giving us access to the audio to share directly with our listeners. Check out their podcasts!

“I'm fairly introverted which I find a lot of people are surprised by given the number of events that I've run over the years. I don't actually like attending events where I don't have a fairly structured role to play. I think to some extent being the organizer of the event gave me a role and job responsibilities. It helped me as an introvert feel more comfortable.” - Joe Robinson

By day, Joe Robinson is the Co-Founder of Hummingbird, a new service focused on fighting financial crime. But today we’re talking to him about his side project, a community he sparked called Designers + Geeks.

Joe started Designers + Geeks for people who, like him, love design, art, and technology. For the past decade, they’ve been featuring monthly speakers on niche topics—designing for all human senses, designing for dyslexia, designing for accessibility, designing for stigma—bringing people together in cities like San Francisco and New York.

This was not Joe’s first time around the block with community building. He founded Live Music SF and led Silicon Valley NewTech, a sister event to New York Tech and the first ever series on Meetup. Joe calls himself an introvert, which is surprising  given he has hosted hundreds of meetups in his life. But Joe shares how being a leader in this situation has given him a structured role to play has made him more comfortable in this setting.

We dive in with Joe about how his introversion has helped him create meetups that are a comfortable experience for all.

Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:

• Serial community builder. How Joe launched and led a number of local meetups as passion projects.
• The first gathering. What Joe did when only two people showed up to his first meetup.
• The introverted community leader. There is not one personality type that suits a community organizer.
• IRL vs. online. Establishing ritual, setting expectations, and running a meetup like clockwork.
• Paid vs. free events. Generating buy-in from members.
• Venue partnership. Creating a relationship that is mutually beneficial.

👋🏻Say hi to Joe and learn more about Designers + Geeks

📄See the full transcript 

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.