Brunch with some early adopter Connectors

A few weeks ago, we sent an email looking for a few “brave souls”; a small group who would organize 3Qs meetings for the week of May 7th. Several Connectors stepped up, and worked to bring the 3Qs to their settings: from public swimming pools to schools, to their workplaces and groups of their friends.

On Saturday, we had brunch (complete with make-your-own-waffles!) to thank these early-adopters, and to learn about their experiences, which ranged from hosting a 3Qs and engaging people in their setting, to running into small and large hurdles – from finding a time for people meet to bureaucratic issues – that made the process a bit more challenging.  It was exciting to hear their stories, and to see a glimmer of the potential of this network.

To the “brave souls” – Thank you so much for being willing to experiment and joining us in these earliest days of the pilot!

More good work done by Connectors! Earlier this week, Dan and Susan used the event space in our office to host a 3Qs meeting with 13 members of the mediation community.

Dan and Susan with the group of mediators

Though Dan made it clear that their 3Qs responses did not need to be mediation-related, much of the discussion did naturally center on the work they have in common.

One of the mediators, Lisa, said she’d like to do workshops on mediation. When asked why she hadn’t done it, she expressed a need to find partners, a space and organizational support. Another, Gail, talked about her goal of creating hyperlocal mediation centers. She had worked to do this in upper Manhattan, emphasizing neighborhoods, but found obstacles: the existing mediation organizations saw her as competition, and she would have difficulty paying the  overhead.

This discussion also revealed some challenges facing many mediators across settings. One of the those challenges is making the public more aware of the benefits of mediation. Another is making mediation sustainable for mediators; it is often offered as a free or low-cost service for the benefit of the public, but mediators need to make a living too.

This 3Qs discussion raised an issue for Idealist Groups: when doing something for the common good is also directly beneficial to individuals in the group, how can groups best determine what falls outside the scope of the 3Qs?  We look forward to working with groups like the mediators to strike the right balance.

Thanks Dan, Susan, and the mediators for sharing your experience with us.

The Pool at Riverbank State Park on the West Side

When she came in to see us last week, Sandy was concerned that her 3Qs meeting at the pool at Riverbank State Park wasn’t going to attract much interest. After handing out flyers, sending out emails, and talking to people every chance she got, she only had two or three RSVP’s. She decided to go ahead with the meeting as planned, since she thought they could still have a meaningful conversation. Her hard work paid off. Eight people showed up  for her first meeting, including some she’d never met. Here’s what she had to say about the experience:

People really wanted to talk and it got more personal than I thought it would get…people were extremely open with each other. When it was over, two people stayed to connect to help each other with their intention; a woman who wanted to help vets met someone who is a physician’s assistant who works with some vets, and they exchanged contact information.

I loved it and had a chance to connect with people I see every day and others I’ve never seen.  More importantly, it gave them an opportunity to connect with each other and share.

Some of the swimmers at Sandy's meeting.

Sandy’s results are encouraging because she was able to bring together people who first appeared not to have much in common beyond swimming. Yet they all had a good intention to share, and were interested in helping each other to take their next steps. We helped support Sandy with a simple flyer and some advice while she did the tough work of inviting people. Ultimately it was curiosity, openness, and a sense of possibility that brought them to the table — looks like we’re on the right track.

A great step forward, with more to come!

If it looks a little quiet around here, it’s because we’ve been working with Connectors one-on-one to get them set up for successful 3Qs meetings this week. We’ve answered emails, fielded phone calls, and met in-person with several of you, and we’re doing our best to create any new materials you need.

Sandy is hosting a 3Qs meeting at her local park

One of our Connectors, Sandy, visits a community pool on the Upper West Side. She decided this would be great place to try the 3Qs. I caught up with Sandy for a quick Q&A:

Q: What’s your plan for the 3Qs?

A: I plan to have the event at Riverbank State Park, on benches under trees, if the weather permits, and as an alternative, in an indoor space. Our meeting will take place at 8:45 AM after morning lap swim time.

Q: How many people are you inviting?

A: I’ve sent out flyers via email to about 200 people and have personally handed out aver 50 flyers.  Flyers have been left at the pool sign in desk at least four days a week for the past three weeks, and will continue to be handed out this week.

Q: How are you ‘pitching’ this to people?

A: I’m first asking if they know what Idealist is as an ice breaking question.  The people who are familiar with Idealist are very interested in what we are doing.  Those that have never heard about Idealist are a much harder sell.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far, and how did you handle it?

A: My biggest challenge has been to get the emails sent to the list of swimmers.  In the end it has been sent out twice, but always an attachment, which I believe was not opened by most people.  I needed to rely on the people who controlled the list.  It is also extremely difficult to reach my fellow swimmers directly as they come and go during the morning lap swim time.  Most do not pick up the flyers and many are not interested.  After swimming so early in the morning they want to get home after their swim. I don’t think I’m going to get many people.  This morning I thought I may only get 2 or 3 people, despite great efforts and lots of flyers distributed and many conversations.  I hope for good weather.

We had a feeling some Connectors might run into challenges, and Sandy’s setting is a challenging one indeed; she’s trying to get the word out to a lot of people who don’t know each other or get together very often. But there’s an upside: if she decides to have another meeting after this first one, then they’ve seen her before and might be more receptive next time. Here’s to small steps!

Thanks for sharing, Sandy!

You might remember that Ami and I traveled to Portland to meet with our web development team and work out specifics to bring the 3Qs online. Users could use a form like this one to share their good intention with an Idealist Group and its Connectors.

A wireframe model of the form people can use to post intention to an Idealist Group

But before we could get this on the site, we had to do our homework to be sure we build something useful and intuitive.

We started by building some wireframes — models of how the feature might work. The finished feature might not look much like this by the end of the discussion, but it gives us a place to start.

Then we met with the dev team to talk through the basics, trying to answer questions like…

• How do we make sure that intentions are seen by the right people?
• How do we show that someone has taken action?
• How does this fit with all the other features Idealist already offers?

After a lot of stimulating discussions, the team was able to start working on it. It’ll still be a while before it’s perfected and tested, but we’re all very excited to see it coming together.

Can you imagine using this tool to help people share their intentions and take action? What challenges do you expect, and what ideas do you have for improving it? Please add your comments below.

Swimmers at a community swimming pool, an acting class, a publishing house, a school, a large nonprofit, an apartment building, a group of friends. These are all examples of the settings where our earliest adopters plan to pose the 3Qs at meetings during our “beta” launch the week of May 7th.   We are very much looking forward to working and learning with these “brave souls” over the next six weeks as IdealistNYC moves from intention to action.

What are they planning to do?  Some are framing their meeting as an introductory “focus group” around the 3Qs, but without promising too much beyond that.  Others are ready to launch an Idealist Group in their setting that will help people act on their intentions over time.

We’re already getting helpful and specific feedback on the materials in our toolkit as people begin to actually use the stuff. As more connectors jump in over the spring and summer, they’ll know that the toolkit has been tried and tested by those before them, and can feel more confident that they’ll be successful when they get started.

If you’re ready to join us now, we’d love to work with you!  Please email us at connectors@idealist.org.

Phyllis helped connect Jirandy to a space she needed for her new program

A while back, we talked about Phyllis Gutterman and the 3Qs meetings she started hosting for the Cultural/Arts organizations in Mamaroneck, NY. She’s continued to coordinate those meetings in the library’s community room, with each meeting drawing many repeat attendees — and also a lot of new faces. I took the train up to Mamaroneck to observe and learn from their success.

It was an inspiring event. Twenty-five arts and cultural leaders came together to talk about their individual and common needs. There were representatives from Larchmont-Mamaroneck Center for Continuing Education, LMC-TV, and the Westchester Sandbox Theatre, to name a few. There were individual artists and musicians, and representatives from the Mamaroneck Library, which is hosting the meetings in their community room.

They’ve been having great conversation and are starting to discover some shared needs.

One of the people at January’s meeting was Jirandy Martinez, from the the Hispanic Resources Center of Larchmont and Mamaroneck. After the meeting, when HRCLM wanted to start a Theater of the Oppressed program for members of their Girls Empowerment Group, they had a problem — they needed a space to meet in for ten weeks to rehearse.

Jirandy immediately thought of Phyllis’s meeting, and emailed the other attendees. She got an offer from Linda Bhandari at the library, who was able to offer the library’s space for the duration of the program.

This is a compelling example of the kind of transformative connection that can emerge when we help people to share their ideas and needs with people around them.

To learn more  and discuss Phyllis’s most recent meeting, take a look at her recent post in the forum.

Great work, everyone!

How can two people best share their good intentions? Illustration by Josh Shayne

If you’ve been around here for long, you’ve probably seen a picture that looks a lot like this one, accompanied by a simple question:

If two of the people in this building both wanted to do something for the common good (like build a garden in that empty lot), how would they ever find  each other so they can work together?

It’s one of the fundamental problems we’ve been working on at Idealist since day one — making it easier for the world’s do-gooders to connect and help each other take action. IdealistNYC takes on this problem by training Connectors to ask the people around them the 3Qs:

1. What do you want to do (or what are you already doing) for the common good?
2. What’s getting in your way?
3. What would help you to move forward?

…and then help them work through the answers. One of the tools we developed to make it easier is this intentions worksheet. We thought Connectors could print it out and use it — at a 3Qs meeting or just as a survey tool — to easily collect people’s good intentions and follow up with them later.

Ever have one of those cliched slap-your-forhead moments — when you realize something that is so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t think of it sooner? SLAP!: this form should be online on Idealist.org!

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking with our developers about how to design a simple feature for Idealist that lets Connectors and the people they ask the 3Qs put their good intentions online, so other people can find them and offer help. It’s been going really well; next week, Ami and I will go see the developers in our Portland office to work out the details so we can start building it for you.

Here’s how it would work:
When a Connector is ready, they send people in their setting a link to a special form on Idealist that asks the 3Qs. Each person who does the form can decide who they want to show it to; maybe they just want the Connectors in their group to know about it, or perhaps they want everyone on Idealist to be able to see it and offer help. This form gets linked to the person who submitted it (so Connectors can follow up) and to the Idealist Group (so Connectors in the group can collaborate).

People who fill out the form can also say if they want a Connector to follow up with them or not — so we’re not bothering people who aren’t actually asking for help. Connectors will be able to see these intentions on their Idealist Group page so they can follow up appropriately. Once an intention has been acted on, the person who posted it can mark it as “done” and it will show up on the Idealist Group’s page.

We’re really excited about this idea, because we think it combines the best of online and offline. People in your setting will be able to use the web to share their ideas with the largest possible audience, but they’ll still get all the benefits of having a Connector to talk to in person to work through their obstacles to action.

What do you think? Can you see yourself using this feature to help people move from intention to action? How would you make it better?

After a lot of work with many of you over the past few months, we are now ready to jump into the next phase of this project.  And for this, we’re looking for 25 people (more or less) who want to be among the first to start introducing and implementing this idea in their neighborhood, school, or workplace.

To do this, all you need is to be able to imagine yourself (with a friend or a colleague) facilitating a conversation among neighbors, friends, or coworkers about what people want to do for the common good, why they haven’t done it, and what would help them do it – and then report back on how it went.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it. And to make this a success, we’ll support you in every way we can over the next several weeks, starting from a series of meetings in our office this week and next.

If you are interested and want to hear more, please RSVP for the one that works best for you:

Thursday, March 29th, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Friday, March 30th, from 9:30am to 11:00am in the MORNING

Monday, April 2nd, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm

Tuesday, April 3rd, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm

If none of these times work for you, please let Lorene know at lorene[at]idealist.org and we’ll find a time that works.

Thanks again, and have a good week!

Last night’s meeting focused on fleshing out suggestions for how to be most effective in each of the five roles a Connector might play as part of an Idealist Group.  The 13 participants, working in teams of two or three, added their ideas in a round-robin session of brainstorming.

Brainstorming in small groups

In less than an hour, we had a terrific set of ideas from which we’ll create one-pagers for each role.   These one-pagers will be included in the Toolkit for Connectors that is currently in the works and which we’ll be sharing for feedback soon.

Then we talked through everyone's ideas

Thanks to everyone who helped out last night!

This Wednesday evening and Friday morning we’re having small group meetings to work on materials for the Connector toolkit. More specifically, we’d like to focus on the various roles that connectors can play in their community (facilitator, coach, researcher, reporter/storyteller, etc.) and flesh out the training materials for each of them.  If you’d like to participate in one of the meetings, there’s still time to sign up:

Wednesday, March 14, 6:30-8:30 PM

Friday, March 16, 9:30-11 AM

Hope to see you there!

About 50 of us met up last night for drinks, games, and live music. A big thanks to Fat Cat, who helped us out by waiving their cover charge and letting us play games for free. It was the first event we’ve put together ‘just for fun’. Got an idea for a future fun event? Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks to everyone who came out, hope you had as much fun as we did!

Connectors got a chance to relax and have fun together

Thanks to everyone who shared such thoughtful comments and questions over the last couple of weeks. We’ve just posted the FAQ on the site. Check it out! If you have additional comments or questions, you can post them in the forums.

Our developers just released a new feature on Idealist.org that makes it easier to access your Idealist Group — so you can comment on the group page and easily find your group’s members and listings. If you’re a Connector and a member of a group, you’ll now have easy access to that group from the new menu at the top of the screen.

The menu for accessing my group "Test!" (I was excited)

If you’re an administrator of a group, opening the menu also lets you edit the group and change preferences.

It's menu-rific!

Note that you’ll only have this menu if you’re a Connector and join or start an Idealist Group.  Don’t hesitate to email Mike[at]idealist.org if you have any questions.

Here is a draft of our Frequently Asked Questions, with answers for all of them. You can read this online as a Google Doc, or if you prefer you can download it as a Word file.

- To read it as a Google Doc, click here

- To download the Word file, click on this link: IdealistNYCFAQ

You can then share your thoughts as a Comment at the bottom of this page, or by emailing me directly at ami@idealist.org (in which case you can also send me the Word file with any edits you’d like to suggest). Whatever works best for you.

Thanks in advance for reading this and letting us know what you think. Every bit will help: Is everything clear? What’s missing? What did we forget? What else would help you there?

As we receive your suggestions, we’ll be editing and adding throughout this week (you’ll see the changes as we make them), and by Friday we hope to have this done.

Thanks again! What you’ll see under those links is the result of hundreds of conversations with all of you, and we couldn’t have gotten to this point without you.

We can see your face now!

It’s exciting to see some of you getting started on the forums. To make it more useful and fun, we added a couple of features.

1. The forums now have avatars, so you can tell at a glance who’s talking
2. It’s now possible to add an Idealist Profile link on your forum page, which allows others to easily access your profile to Connect and send you private messages.

If you don’t have a forum account yet, you can sign up here!

Welcome, and thanks in advance for your thoughts. As we wrote you, please take a look at this initial list of questions and use the Comments at the bottom of the page to suggest any additional ones. No question is too small or too detailed, so don’t be shy. (If you’d like a bit of context for some of these questions, see the updated About page at the top of the site.)

By Monday evening we want to have all of these questions – and any others you may suggest between now and Sunday – answered to your satisfaction. We’ll keep updating this list here, and then we’ll start answering these Qs on a separate document, which we’ll share for your feedback as we go. Thank you!

THE BIG PICTURE

1. What’s this project all about?
2. What’s the ultimate goal? How will we know if we got there?
3. How will we measure progress?
4. What are our shared values?
5. How will we work with other organizations?
6. Will we work in different languages?
7. What about people with no Internet access?
8. What is this called?
9. How do we protect the brand?
10. Does anything go, or are some kinds of action not allowed?
11. What about other online tools? (Meetup, Facebook, Craigslist)?
12. How is this project funded?
29. What is it about this new idea that will do a better job of translating intention into action?

CONNECTORS AND IDEALIST GROUPS

13. What is a Connector?
14. What is a “setting?”
15. What do Connectors do?
16. What do Connectors not do?
17. What is an Idealist Group?
18. What roles can different Connectors play in a Group
19. I want to be a Connector. What do I do?
20. I want to start or join an Idealist Group. What do I do?
21. How do I connect with other people involved in this project?
22. What support will Idealist provide?
30. What kind of formal agreement should exist between Idealist, Connectors, and community projects?

THE IDEALISTNYC PILOT

23. Why start in New York City?
24. What exactly is happening during the week of May 7th?
25. How will we promote this across the city?
26. What’s the timeline for the Pilot? When do we go beyond New York?
27. What if I’m not in New York? How can I get involved?
28. I don’t have a lot of time, but I want to support this initiative, what can I do?
31. How do we all stay in touch?
32. How do we spread the world and let the community know that we are here to help?

Please note that we’ll keep the numbering unchanged for every question so that you can more easily see any new ones when you come back, and so that we can refer to them by number later. (This may mean that as we add more questions and reorganize the categories, the numbers will no longer be in straight order at some point.)

Lindy, a Connector who joined the network this summer, is a member of a Socratic conversation club who meet monthly to discuss different topics.

Recently, she proposed to the group that they run the 3Qs activity and see what types ofunrealized intentions would bubble to the surface. On January 19th, sixteen people met and discussed their answers to the questions “What would you like to do to help others?”; “Why haven’t you done it?” and “What would help you to do it?”.  

The meeting flowed nicely, and everyone had three minutes to share their thoughts, which ranged from wanting to convert an abandoned facility into a hospital for the homeless to teaching job skills to the unemployed to empowering young women to feel good about themselves and their bodies. There were two clear takeaways for Connectors: being prepared to focus on a specific and manageable next step for someone with a big idea, and second, encouraging people who have a specific idea of what they want to do to seek out existing nonprofits who might be working on that particular issue.

Experimenting with 3Qs meetings now can help all of us learn more about being effective Connectors in our settings. If you have a 3Qs story to share, please let us know how it went by posting on the forum.

Wednesday afternoon, we had a great meeting around our preliminary storyboard for a 90-second video about this network. A small group of volunteers came in for an hour or so to talk about big-picture objectives for the video, and gave us lots of great comments about the initial ideas we presented.  We plan to meet again in a couple of weeks to share more ideas. If you’re interested in seeing the initial sketches, you can download the doc here (with apologies in advance for my drawing. And my penmanship.)

Nicole, Barbara, and Mike discuss the storyboard

This Wednesday, February 1st, we’re meeting with volunteers who are interested in helping create a brief video about this network.  We’ll present our rough storyboard for feedback and talk about next steps.

There are two meetings on Wednesday: one at 2:00pm and another at 7:00pm. If you like working with video and want to join for one of the sessions, please email Mike — mike.sayre[at]idealist.org.

Every little bit helps. (Photo: Australian War Memorial Collection, Flickr/Creative Commons)