In response to the Coronavirus crisis affecting all elements of our society, Withfriends is facilitating a series of meetings and chatspace for organizers on the platform and the community around them to give space for sharing strategies around sustainability and survival during this unprecedented time.
You can use the table of contents on the left to scan through the document for relevant sections.
Please comment at will!
Discussions
To keep the knowledge sharing easy and quick throughout the week, please consider joining our shared Slack workspace, here, where you can ask questions directly to any of the organizers and brainstorm in real time about how financial models are changing and any kinds of questions, big or small.
Meetings
Please join us for one of the upcoming meetings, or read some of the feedback from the first one. We’re working on rolling out features recommendations asap.
Organizers are weighing difficult decisions right now and Withfriends wants to offer this space for an open conversation about the challenges our spaces, programs, and communities are facing.
We know for sure there are organizers trying to figure out the same things you are, and you all are resilient and creative people. While Withfriends is always happy to offer advice, we also want to give you all the opportunity to hear from one another directly.
We can talk about specific concerns and strategies for our spaces, events, and communities, or we can just talk about the obstacles we're personally facing that make that work difficult. If you're not available, feel free to share any thoughts over email. We'll take some notes, which I'll share afterwards.
Outline
The goal here is to seed as many ideas/perspectives as possible around organizer issues during the Coronavirus outbreak.
With the overwhelming amount of information we’re absorbing as a society in the last few days, it’s difficult to find specific resources for people running small businesses and responsible for events, and that’s the space I want to make available here. Resolution on any exact strategies isn’t necessary - it’s a brainstorm, not a debate.
Because of volume, we’ll forgo introductions in the beginning, but we ask that anyone who is comfortable speaking is invited to take a few minutes to introduce themselves, their programs, and their community. This part is important, as it helps contextualize concerns for spaces around the country. Different kinds of spaces and communities will need different solutions.
Then, consider the following prompts - although any thoughts are welcome.
Share something you’re concerned about
...and a strategy you have for dealing with it
...or that you’re asking for help dealing with
In response to something someone else said
...a different strategy for dealing with it
...or a new concern that it raises
At first, we’ll likely cover some familiar ground, but if we all try and take our time to add something new, I feel confident we’ll all come out of here with the beginnings of a lot of conversations that we’ll want to continue working on amongst ourselves over the next week and beyond.
A few more technical notes
I’ve never run a video chat with this many people! I hope it doesn’t break.
Please consider putting your video on mute when you’re not speaking
When you want to speak, add a comment with your name to the chat; I will do my best to keep“stack”
To help keep things moving I may step in if you go longer than 5 minutes
I plan to wrap this up after an hour; it will likely feel like we’re cutting things short
We’ll be looking at ways to facilitate more of these conversations going forward - and we just added organizer search and discovery features to Withfriends this weekend, so you can look organizers up if you want to follow up with them later
Resources
This is a brief list of resources that have been shared with us to date.
China Residences Report: A general guide that started in early February, updated regularly
Cherrybombe: Resources for food & beverage organizers in New York, Austin, Seattle, Oakland
Discussions
Meetings
Outline
Resources