Building an "accelerator" for community groups and social clubs

A Q&A with Build IRL founders, Saumya Gupta and Colton Heward-Mills

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been introduced to dozens of people who are newly energized by the issues of loneliness and isolation but don’t know where to begin. A lot of these conversations involve a call or meeting and no further follow-up. But when I met Saumya Gupta last summer, I knew it would be different. Her enthusiasm and sticktoitiveness gave me the sense that she wasn’t just going to talk about these issues but actually take action. 

So, when she launched Build IRL a few months ago with her co-founder, Colton Heward-Mills, I was excited to follow along. What they’ve created is something really distinctive and fun: an accelerator-style program for people who are building in-real-life (IRL, as the kids say) community groups. The first cohort wrapped up in June (showcase highlights here), and based on the continued engagement of their alumni and their waitlist for future cohorts, it appears to have been a big success. 

This week’s interview is a little different. Saumya and Colton aren’t experts, and they aren’t community builders who have been doing this work for a long time. Rather, they’re two people who have been energized by this new wave of communitarianism and decided to get off the sidelines and do something. And that’s exactly why I wanted to interview them. Saumya and Colton offer inspiration for what’s possible — both for “community curious” people who are thinking of taking the leap and building IRL and for long-time community builders who are considering ways they can inject new life into their communities. 

- Sam

PS: If you’re interested in what Build IRL is doing, there are a few ways you can get involved. You can follow their Substack newsletter, Twitter, and Instagram. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, you can apply to join their waitlist for the next cohort. And, if you’re interested in becoming a partner or supporter of Build IRL, you can reach out to them directly at team@buildirl.com.

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Saumya Gupta (left) and Colton Heward-Mills (right) at the Build IRL SF Showcase

Building an accelerator for in-person communities isn’t necessarily the first thing I’d think two Stanford and Harvard Business School alumni would do. But it seems like it’s very personal for you two. I’d be curious to hear — on a personal level — how each of you came to the idea of working to strengthen connection within communities and starting Build IRL.

Colton: I grew up in a community that had a strong sense of belonging and a strong sense of the importance of joining things. My parents are both immigrants from Ghana, and where we grew up in New Jersey, there were a lot of other Ghanaian immigrants. I like to say I had an abundance of aunties. There were people in my community who knew me and cared about me who weren't just my parents — there were all these other people in my life, who I felt like I could turn to for advice and encouragement. I always felt like I had this broad sense of community that I belonged to, and I've always been trying to recreate that for myself in the places I've lived. So it felt very natural for me to get involved in this work, and I feel very much at home in it. 

Saumya: I grew up in India, also with an abundance of community. However, I didn't know that I would end up working in community. I knew the problem that I wanted to tackle, but I did not know how I was going to tackle it. In hindsight, I've been a community builder all my life. I threw the biggest Diwali parties. I was always a very active alumni of my university. I've always been the person who brings people together: that's how I derive value in my life. I also moved like nine times growing up, so community-building, for me, was just survival. As a small kid who changes schools every two years, I figured out how to go from a new girl in the class to your best friend in a week. The best way to do that is to help others — and help others make friends. 

Until we started Build IRL, I didn’t realize I was a community builder. This is true with a lot of the community builders we work with: it’s not something that you associate yourself with until you realize what you’re doing. Then you have this lightbulb moment: “Oh, yeah, what I do is bring people together!”

How did you land on your current model with Build IRL? How does it actually work? 

Colton: Before starting anything, Saum and I spent weeks listening and observing. We met with dozens of folks who run social groups doing everything under the sun: nerding out on science and tech, bonding over telling embarrassing stories, connecting over wildly creative music, and much, much more.  

Although these organizers were pretty different on the surface, we kept hearing the same thing from them — building an in-person community is incredibly hard. They were struggling with many challenges we anticipated: funding, getting the word out, finding venues, managing social dynamics among members, and finding bandwidth to deal with all the administrative tasks of running a group. But there was a more subtle, insidious problem they were facing — ironically, the work of building community felt lonely. They were holding space for others to find belonging, but because they were always in planning mode or host mode, they didn't get as much time to enjoy that community themselves. They also felt like the work they put into making IRL community happen was underappreciated or unseen.

At the end of these interviews, many of the community builders we spoke to would ask who else we had interviewed. We'd share a few names and stories, and they'd respond, "Oh, it's cool how that group figured out marketing," or "That builder's story sounds really inspiring," and ask to be connected. That was a big "aha" for us. We thought, what if we created a community of practice where these builders could learn from each other, tackle common challenges, and be around others who could understand and support them? 

And so the idea for the accelerator was born. We released an application, and to our delight, dozens of groups applied to join us. We whittled it down to an amazing cohort of 25 clubs focused on a wide variety of themes: everything from a group focused on celebrating commonalities across cultures called the Children of Diaspora, to a beloved community makerspace called Noisebridge, to a group called The Plenary focused on community engagement through art and science, and even a group focused on learning to process grief and turn it into joy called Sommanat. Over the course of five weeks, we ran a series of workshops, expert talks, and social gatherings to help them support and learn from each other. That all culminated in a showcase and club bazaar in SF where 200+ people came to learn about, join, and support the clubs in our cohort.

What happens after community builders complete the Build IRL accelerator? 

Saumya: Like most communities, you can only engineer so much. The ongoing engagement evolved organically. We set the expectation from the beginning that we wanted this to be a continuous community of practice where people could return. Offering that space created avenues for builders to start taking action themselves. We had builders who started creating resources for everyone. We had builders who hosted a “three-week” reunion. At this point, builders have probably hosted five or six events themselves, and it’s only been a few weeks since the first cohort wrapped up. That’s the benefit of working with community builders: they know how to build community.

Still, they also wanted our support, both in creating accountability spaces and in facilitating their continued, collective learning journeys. So we have created our own programming and we meet as a group every other week. Sometimes, we talk about the problems people are facing. Sometimes, we share different things that we’ve learned. We want to be there to support them so that they don't burn out, that they can navigate their challenges, and that they can enjoy their successes. 

Colton: They also started joining each other’s communities which was amazing to see. A swing dance community in our cohort called The Dog House hosts a beginner night that several other builders in our cohort now attend, and others have become regulars at a running and reflection club in our cohort called Run Your Life. In the future, we’ll create opportunities for alums to engage and support the next cohort of builders. Down the line, it’s our hope that a broader community of local people doing community-building forms — not just within the cohort but across our cohorts and beyond. 

Build IRL cohort members (left) and showcase audience (right)

What are the thorny challenges or difficult problems that members of your cohort continue to wrestle with?

Saumya: The biggest issue for builders is resourcing. Most members of the cohort feel like they’re in a very fragile place — they don’t have steady ground to stand on. Often, if the core person leading the club were to fall sick tomorrow, the club would stop existing. Many of these groups didn’t know how to have the conversation about money. All of them need business models to create infrastructure that sustains their groups over time, yet few of them have these sustainable models. 

The second problem is feeling like the work you’re doing is underappreciated. It’s not sexy work to do community work right now, so you feel lonely because you feel you are not valued. Community builders carry such an emotional burden: You’re holding space for hundreds of people, and you may feel that you should always be available for these people. You feel like you can always be doing more. This isn’t only a leadership challenge; it’s an emotional challenge.

Colton: People have a lot going on in their lives. They’re asking things like, “How do I build resilience into this community I care so much about? How do I ensure there aren’t any single points of failure?” There’s no way that a one-month accelerator can fully close the gap on all of the things that you need to do in order to create that kind of resilience and sustainability. What we did was help people get a running start, and now that they have a community of support, we are hoping to encourage people to keep going, keep going, keep going, through that point at which they have that foundation that feels sturdy.

Now that you’re on the other side of the Build IRL pilot, what are your biggest takeaways? Did anything surprise you about the experience?

Colton: What was novel and unexpected for me was the extent to which this idea of cross-pollination in building with each other would take hold and be valuable. There’s this strength in numbers element of the work that's really hard to quantify or describe, but it was critical for the success of the whole experience. It’s the feeling that you're not doing it alone. It’s having the social proof of other people who are just a little bit ahead of you — or a little bit behind you — that creates this sense of like, “Okay, I can do this. I'm not crazy for thinking that this should exist and there's a need for this. I can take the next step.” 

There has also been some emergent, unexpected collaboration among our builders. It didn't dawn on me how useful it might be for a club that has existed for a while — that might even have a physical space — to partner with something that is getting off the ground and say, “Hey, we have a space to offer, but we need new energy in programming. Like, please come do something at our place.” For the people who are just beginning to hear that, it's like, “Oh my gosh, that's super useful. I didn't know where to turn for even getting started and you've just offered me this touchstone to get underway.”

Saumya: Another thing that surprised us is just how much you can help people evolve their mindsets. For instance, we asked a question about resourcing early on, and most people were like, “We don't want to touch money. We don't want to talk about money.” Most of the community builders don't come from the business world. The kind of people we attract — and the kind of people we want to support — are very uncomfortable with this money conversation. Yet, we saw in our own cohort really effective models for resourcing organizations: a crowdsourcing model where you create a pool of resources for the community to use, a nonprofit model powered by community-driven donations, and more. 

When we shifted the conversation from, “How do you make money?” to “How do you create resources for resilience?” most people seriously engaged with this question. By the end, a lot of our builders would say things like, “I would feel better if I was paid for this work. It would make me feel like I’m valued.” It's not, “If we have resources, our problems will be solved.” It's a mindset change: “We, as a community, feel that this work is valuable enough for us to invest in it. We, as a community, believe that community building is valuable enough that the people who are doing the groundwork should be supported.” 

What’s next for Build IRL as an organization? How are you considering evolving the model moving forward?

Saumya: We will have more cohorts. We already have 40 social clubs on our waitlist for the next cohort. We want to continue to support more builders. We want to continue to build a community of practice. We will continue to work in SF: there's a lot more work to be done here, we are just starting. But we also want to figure out if we can help other people who want to create spaces like this for builders across the country.

Colton: Our experience with launching Build IRL has mirrored the experience of the community builders that we've been working with. Because what we're building is, effectively, a community. We're trying to help people learn from each other, we're trying to help people support each other, and we're trying to encourage more people to create these spaces for social connection in society. It's been heartening for us to go through the experience and realize that you can start from zero and get to something real. We think we’re really onto something here. With that learning, we've been thinking about how to grow it and how to make it sustainable. We want the work to keep going, but like many of the builders we’ve been working with, we need resources to make that happen.  

One of the reasons why I wanted to interview you two is because you’ve both more recently come to these issues of connection, community, and the like — and rather than just talk about it, you did something. What advice do you have for others who may have become “community curious” in the past few years and who are wondering where to begin?

Colton: The big caveat to start is that it’s a massive privilege to be able to work on Build IRL. It’s a massive privilege to have the time and space to explore this work in a way that allows us to take our time and try to get to the crux of understanding: what is the problem, and how can we make progress against it?

Now, what I would say to people trying to do this work is you have to really start with your eyes open and your ears open. Look around. What is happening on the ground where you are? Go knock on the door and go talk to people in person. Saumya and I are both part of a social club. We went to local community events in San Francisco to try to understand what's happening in these spaces with people who are trying to do the work already. There's a lot of research out there about loneliness and isolation. And all of that offers super useful context. But if you want to figure out what to do about it, you have to go find people who are doing things about it. And then you have to start — then you have to do something. There's been a lot of value for us in just having the willingness to experiment and having the support of a network of people who want to see us succeed.

Saumya: I love fun — fun is a core value of our accelerator. I think this work is a lot of fun. Unlike a corporation where you have a five-year plan or whatever, the most amazing thing about community is that it emerges. You have an idea out there — whatever your quirky little passion that you want to talk about — and you just create a dinner and have the conversation. You can start with: I want to build a community that should exist in the world because I want it for myself. There will be other people like you who also will want this community, and you can invite these people in to build it with you. The most intimidating step is the first step because you don't know if you’ll look like a fool. But the worst case scenario is two people show up to your dinner, and you make two new friends. 

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