For Us, By Us | Celebrating Community Builders at Chime: Quinton Henry
“Community is a place where you can come, be yourself, and be supported,” says Quinton Henry, Chime’s IT Support Manager. “It’s not always a place where everyone agrees, or where you’ll find people just like you all the time; it’s a place where you can come and be yourself around different people, a place to learn how to love yourself and others. A good community looks like a group of folks from different backgrounds, with enough empathy to think outside of themselves and learn how to work with and love each other to move forward together.”
Quinton knows a thing or two about what it takes to build a community and be part of one. In 2020, when he started to stream the video games he was playing, he noticed a lack of representation and community: “There weren’t any places for streamers who were people of color to go,” he says. When he was approached by a friend and invited to be part of an online community, the Black Streamer Community (BSC), he joined and soon became an administrator of the group.
Since then, the Black Streamer Community has grown from 20 to 400 people, building a community for people of color around streaming and content creation. “Our real purpose is to create a space where people feel supported and can cultivate their skills,” Quinton explains. The group helps folks in areas like content creation, YouTube, drawing, and graphic design. They meet up every year in a different city. Every Saturday, they get together online to play games virtually or talk about topics that might come up.
How to play a meaningful part in your community
As an administrator of the BSC, Quinton has seen a lot of interactions and observed community members at large. On being a contributing, positive force in a community, he recommends following a few principles:
Come in with an open mind: “A lot of us like to say we’re open-minded, but when we’re confronted with adversity, it can be easy to come back into our comfort zone,” Quinton says. “Community members add the most value when they are transparent and vulnerable, and they accept and give criticism with love.”
Be humble: “The most impactful community members I’ve seen are never too prideful to say they were wrong or admit when they don’t know something,” he explains. “Being humble in this way is also about practicing being open-minded and learning new things.”
Be willing to do the work: “Sometimes, being part of a community involves working on issues, like holding space to talk through disagreements,” says Quinton. “It is a constant reminder to practice empathy, reconcile, and work through the discomfort that may arise to become a stronger community in the end.”
The role of community at work
While he helps create a community within the Black Streamer Community in his free time, Quinton also works to build community at work, too. “The community you have at work plays a large role — you’re here the majority of the day, away from friends and family, so it’s in your interest to create a place where you feel welcomed,” he says.
To cultivate a community at Chime, Quinton focuses on embracing the commonalities with his coworkers to approach their differences. “One thing I’ve connected with folks over is the common stress of the pandemic,” he says. “As people, we can acknowledge that I went through a hard time, you went through a hard time, and we went through a hard time. We all know what it’s like to take meetings at home with kids in the background or dogs barking. Those shared experiences made us acknowledge that life exists outside of work, and now we all share that commonality, which gives us more space from which to approach our differences.”
On a recent Zoom call with a coworker, Quinton noticed a piece of art by a hip-hop artist he appreciates — and he called it out to his colleague. “I found a commonality for us to connect over,” he says. “My unconscious biases may not have led me to that level of connection without that piece of art as a catalyst for the conversation. We connected about the piece of art and then a bunch of other things. That one thing in common helped us bridge the gap and put aside our differences — and build community.”
In his role as an IT Support Manager, Quinton builds community naturally by interacting with people from every team across the company. “I love connecting with other teams and always encourage my coworkers to take advantage of any opportunity to connect with fellow Chimers,” he says. “Whether at work or in my personal life, connecting with people outside my circle only helps make it bigger and more full.”
