A week in the life of our first Community Fellows
“Our first week with The Collective and Old Oak was an intense one, but it was absolutely powerful, enriching and inspiring.”
Hello Old Oak Community!
You may have heard about the new Community Facilitator Fellowship going on at The Collective Old Oak, and you may have seen and met some of the fellows already. A group of six Fellows were invited to Old Oak last week in order to help The Collective deepen a culture of personal exploration within the Old Oak community, and build acumen for new ways of living together. Our goal is to design and curate safe spaces and experiences with Old Oak members that encourage vulnerability, expression, creativity, authenticity and nonjudgmental interactions.
Our first week with The Collective and Old Oak was an intense one, but it was absolutely powerful, enriching and inspiring. This was one of the few times that I was able to instantly connect and share my background, personality, intentions, doubts and so much more about my personal and professional life to a group of strangers/‘colleagues’. This was because from the start our Fellowship Leaders allowed for an environment where all of us could feel comfortable, in a way that we were able to quickly get to know each other in an authentic and personal way. These kinds of interactions will shape the structure of our Fellowship Program and our goal is to use the spaces available in Old Oak to do the same with as many members as possible!
To give you all some examples of the type of activities and moments we shared last week, I must start with our first day of meeting each other all for the first time. We shared our professional and personal backgrounds, but each time we were pushed a bit farther to reveal additional information such as our doubts at the moment or any issues we were dealing with the past year, and also our intentions for the program and any personal development skills we would like to develop. We broke out in dance sessions. We played an epic game of ‘Never Have I Ever’. We went to Sweaty Thursdays, and it was epic… seriously, look it up and come join us next time! We also headed to The Collective HQ to meet the rest of the Team there and to brainstorm ideas about the structure of our Fellowship and what kind of ideas and practices we want to learn and eventually share with the community at Old Oak.
By revealing so much about ourselves to each other from the beginning, we were able to have hyper-productive moments of creativity where we were able to propose new ideas and be constructively honest to one another without fear of being wrong or feeling like we did not have anything valuable to contribute. This is the kind of environment we hope to curate at Old Oak, but we want to do this collectively with you all, as we know that we have so many things to learn from the community members that live and breath at the space on a daily basis. One of our main goals is to inspire members to initiate projects, events, gatherings, workshops (and whatever else you all may think about) that help everyone reach their fullest potential of creativity, awareness and happiness.
Over the course of 3–4 months, we will be learning practices from fields such as Citizen Engagement, Self-care, Personal Growth and Development, Community Empowerment, Leadership and Accountability Skills, Experience Design and Sustainable Social Impact methods. A quote from a short story we were gifted called Together is Better by Simon Sinek sums our intentions up quite well: “A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other. A good leader doesn’t only inspire us to have confidence in what they can do. A great leader inspires us to have confidence in what we can do.” Together, with The Collective team and Old Oak members, our objective during this Fellowship is to inspire everyone within The Collective Old Oak community to discover their authentic selves, reach their desired potential and ultimately have the confidence to inspire others to do the same.
Words by Matthew Lesniak.
