Building your tribe
If you can’t find community you want, build it
You might have heard the saying you’re the sum of the five people you spend the most time with, whether that’s in real life or virtually. If you can’t find your tribe then how about you create what you want?
I’ve done that several times myself through building running and off-road cycling communities in various places I’ve lived in, and also professional groups. It’s led to lifelong friendships, career opportunities and awesome adventures.
Scenic Sundays
When I was new to living in Wellington back in 2008, I wanted to find people to go running with on a Sunday morning long run, and explore the many trails around the city. I was a member of Wellington Scottish Athletics club and at the time they only did a club run on a Saturday. I asked the person ran the weekly newsletter if I could have a slot advertising a Sunday run and turned out there was latent demand and plenty of people were keen. We’d meet a coffee shop, do a couple hours and have brunch. It was brilliant.
MTB Chicks
In Wellington I also created a women’s mountain biking group just by putting up a few posters in a few bike shops. 10 people turned up for the first ride, the mailing list grew to over 50 and we went on to do a monthly Saturday morning ride and several epic adventure rides in the region. We were also featured in an article in Singletrack magazine.
Thursday Night Gravel Rides
When I moved to Tauranga 2018 I created a weekly gravel riding group as an extra ride for the local road cycling group Psykil. I’d been riding with them for a few months and wanted company to train up for a bikepacking trip I was doing in late summer. Again, I simply asked the group leader, he was keen and we put it in the weekly email.
Format was simple meet at 5:30pm in a location close to the CBD, ride for about 90 mins and go to the pub! It was a winning formula, people loved it. I spent a few Sunday afternoons in the early weeks making up a routes linking up the trail network and we ended up rotating around about five different key routes, which have morphed over the years. There’s plenty of gravel trails around Tauranga close to the city centre, but no maps that link them up into routes that flow. So it just needed a bit of fieldwork.
The group started off in early Summer and was so popular people wanted to carry on through winter. Seven years later it’s still running. I’ve written about it on my website and it led to one of the best offroad trips I’ve ever done, an epic bikepacking trip across the South Island of New Zealand. What I loved about it also was the mental health boost. However testing your week or day had been, the pulse of going for a ride with the group each week and having that chat and connection time after over a beer put everything into perspective. You’d always ride home happy.
Creating a Professional Meetup
In Tauranga back in 2019 I also created a professional group for digital product leaders at the intersection of business, design and technology. I had been in Tauranga for about a year wanted to expand my professional network, but couldn’t find the kind of group I was looking for, it didn’t exist. I asked my manager at the company I was working for if I could use the company boardroom, created a Meetup group and ran it as a pilot for three months. A pilot can’t ‘fail’ so it was a low risk strategy.
The sessions were 8-9 am with coffee and on the first session we did some intros and brainstormed which topics we’d like to explore. We voted on our top three and the most popular topics became the subject of the following three monthly events. I found speakers and created some interactive sessions. We carried on with a session roughly once a quarter.
It was fun, we covered some super interesting topics and I met people who became great friends. It also opened the door to future job opportunities I never would have had otherwise through the connections.
The meetup started out called Digital Tauranga and I was subsequently contacted by Product Aotearoa about a regional linkup with ProductTank meetups in other parts of NZ.
I ended up morphing the group into ProductTank Tauranga, which is part of the global community Mind The Product. I found a co-organiser at a local design thinking meetup and this was a great way to bring complementary skills in and have a wider network for finding venues and speakers. There’s a YouTube playlist of some of the sessions from this time. When I moved to Australia there were a couple of people keen to take over running it.
Creating Your Tribe
What kind of community would you like to be part of?
If you’re feeling like you need more of a tribe that want to go after the same things then start something. Keep it simple. Test the water and do it as a pilot. You might find there’s latent demand and you make great connections, have amazing experiences, and awesome opportunities open up as a result.
There’s some more info on the communities I’ve created and been part of and reflections on those on my website: rebeccaspeirs.com/building-communities
This week’s video
You’re the sum of the five people you spend the most time with, but they don’t have to be IRL.