The Ups and Downs of Growing a Community During The Pandemic
How COVID-19 gave us the opportunity to use words and writing as a vehicle of change
“Do you mind if I ask what you’re using this money for? It doesn’t look too difficult doing what you’re doing.”
One participant asked me after I asked everyone in the Writing Veranda, our free 45-minute online writing session, to donate-as-you-wish to our newly created Venmo account.
I held back from shouting “OHH, you have no idea!”
My face turned bright red. Thoughts whirred in my head as I tried to formulate the perfect answer. I couldn’t help but feel personally attacked. I recalled the countless hours spent creating the content and structure of the session, refining the slides, practicing the right phrases and sentences to say for each activity. Although, now, I realize the obvious. They actually don’t have a clue what we, the Moving the Needles team, are doing in the background. In fact, it’s quite a testament of how well we are doing! If our sessions are smooth and seamless to them, it must mean we’re doing a great job running our programs.
So, what do we do? How have we spent our time creating and building our writer-changemakers community?
“How did we start?” — Humble beginnings
Moving the Needles started as a two-person endeavor. Toffy and I began creating and hosting writing workshops back in April for the sake of our publication. After hearing feedback from our workshop participants, we realized how people want to write yet they have these considerations, fears, and stories that stop them from doing so. Many times, we heard people saying “I am not a good writer” or “I don’t have time to write.” We believe that everyone has the ability to write and that through writing people can create change in many facets of life, whether at the self, community, or society level. So, we set foot on this journey that became Moving the Needles, creating an environment for all to heal through words.
“Do you think anyone would work with us for free?” — Recruiting and gluing the team together
With the scale of our mission, we knew from the start that we would need to ask for support from others. We recruited a friend to help us with research and lead the creation of our writing for mental wellness (Wellness Writing) program. We started looking for an intern, just to end up with three additional team members (two part-time summer interns and a partnership and outreach coordinator). Add in a dash of training, a sprinkle of mentorship, a cup of onboarding, and voila! (Nope, you don’t have to put us in your oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit) Our team was formed — six strong and ambitious women coming together to better the world one word at a time, none of us earning any money or compensation. I am especially grateful to our interns who truly believe in the work that we do. This speaks volumes not only about our mission but about them as people. People who believe that everyone deserves a community. People who believe that words are powerful vehicles of change.
“How do Zoom breakout rooms work!?” — Program management
While we originally ran writing workshops to help people write articles for our publication, we wanted to experiment and create different types of writing sessions to welcome people with different levels of experience. Writing Veranda and Wellness Writing were born after rounds of experimentation, iteration, and research. In the beginning, we wrote meticulous scripts and noted down time stamps. We also experimented with various ways to record attendance and communicate with participants. For each online writing session we host, we create content and slides, plan and practice facilitation to ensure everything goes smoothly, and delegate roles within our team so we are able to get feedback, keep records of attendees and are able to maintain communication with every participant. As we are growing in size, our team is now working on building a structure for scaling as we envision our Writing Veranda’s to be hosted by a lead facilitator in your community all over the globe. This means purchasing tools to assemble the infrastructure and structuring documentation such as slides, templates,“How-to’s” pages, session guidelines, and a program to train our peer facilitators.
“I’ve run out of LinkedIn contacts to message. How do we get more people to join?” — Scaling and partnerships
To grow our community, we used different social media platforms to invite our friends. We then encouraged our friends to invite their friends. As none of us are celebrities with millions of followers, our community growth started plateauing after we exhausted our networks. It was time for us to sit down and brainstorm the many different ways to expand our community. Brainstorming is one of my favorite activities to do with the team. We start with one idea then jump, roll, and springboard to tens of other wacky ideas. Some of our ideas to bring more people include: bring a friend day, speed dating, carnival night, online fitness classes, and form partnerships. In this gold mine of ideas, we picked and experimented with some. Currently, we’re focusing on connecting with organizations that have missions that closely align with ours and have given up on the idea of becoming Tinder 2.0. A few of our partnerships blossomed from friendships and some blossomed into friendships. It’s exciting and humbling to have organizations that trust and believe in our work. I always believed in the power of collaboration, that together we can accomplish much more, and these partnerships have proven this.
“I’ve always wanted to start a podcast!” — Direction and expansion
One of our core values is personal growth, and we practice this daily with our team. Toffy has always wanted to start and create a podcast, and so our team huddled around to discuss how we can create one for MtN. Sowing Change was born after a session of brainstorming. With Toffy’s hard work and the support of Linda and Judy, we were able to launch the first season just months after the initial idea. Now, with our publication and podcast, we hope to highlight changes that are being made in the community, shedding light on undercovered changemakers and everyday individuals who are making a difference.
“No, we don’t want to have a writing competition” — Carving out our values
It’s easy to want to do everything and grab each idea and possibility by the reigns and run with it, especially when we’re young and growing. But what we’re learning is that we need to be intentional and make decisions that are in line with our values. A partner had floated the idea of hosting a writing competition, and Toffy said “No, I don’t want to have a competition — it’s not what we stand for”. It took a while to sink in, but I saw that she had made a good point. We value all writing and contributions in any form. Having a competition would mean we were “grading” different submissions and “valuing” someone’s work over another’s. Growth and expansion is exciting, but we’ve learned we have to do it in a way that stays true to our mission.
“What now?” — Next steps and future goals
To be honest, we are never 100% sure about the direction we’re going. I doubt Silicon Valley ever tells you this, but I am quite certain that founders don’t have exact plans and timelines for their companies/communities that they are building. Each growth trajectory is unique; it is not a linear and streamline process that entrepreneurship classes make it seem. I had to quickly unlearn the notion of perfection and get accustomed to the rollercoaster ride I was on by leaning into feedback. This also means listening to my own voice and instincts, trusting that they will lead me to growth. One of the skills that I am mastering is planning and operating on uncertainties. Instead of being scared and fearful of uncertainties, I’m trying to be creative and ideate around it. What’s most important is that we stick to our core mission, which is to heal the world through words. We do have very exciting programs and events planned out for the next two months, so stay tuned and come along on the ride!
“This sounds exciting — how can I be a part of this?” — Get involved
I hope this gives you some insights to the work that we, Moving the Needles, do on a day-to-day basis to bring you our free writing sessions and events. If you are eager to get involved, here are a few things you can do:
- “I want to try this free online writing session!” — head over to our events page! We have weekly sessions hosted by our lovely peer facilitators
- “This is an exciting mission! I love words/writing/media and want to contribute!” — Let’s chat! Some ways you can collaborate with us are: 1) write with us; 2) join our team; 3) form partnership events. We are always looking for design, fundraising, and social media support!
- “You’re all doing this for free?! I want to donate to your good cause!” — Thank you so much! You can Venmo us at @mtn-community or donate via PayPal.
We hope you join us on this journey. Your contribution helps us move the needles in this world.
If you have any questions, please visit our website (www.movingtheneedles.org) or email me at fair@movingtheneedles.org.
