The mysterious, magical, unpredictable human funk of being in community
A Q&A with Elise Granata, creator of the GROUP HUG newsletter and local community steward
Elise Granata is a self-described “facilitator, community steward, and excitable person” who writes the GROUP HUG newsletter and helps organize the Bradley Street Bike Co-op. I first encountered GROUP HUG late last year after reading Elise’s piece, “What We Lose When Optimizing Community,” and I felt like I found my newsletter spirit animal. Not only was Elise pointing to the “privatization of community” dynamic that I had been exploring for years, her writing was also fun, silly, weird, and accessible in the best possible way.
I really enjoyed this interview with Elise, in part, because we touched on several questions that we haven’t explored in other Connective Tissue Q&As. How do the things we feel when we’re in community with others affect how we show up (and continue showing up)? What happens when we transactionalize and commodify community? And how do we hold the tensions between writing about community and actually practicing it? This conversation offered a mix of practical reflections for us to hold as community builders and members, balanced with big questions and provocations about the structure of community life.
If you’re intrigued at all, please consider giving the full interview a read. And if you’re resonating with what Elise has to say, consider subscribing to GROUP HUG. It’s become an unexpected jolt of joy and weirdness to my inbox each month.
Hugs,
Sam
I have a feeling we’re going to talk a lot about “community” throughout this conversation. So, real quick, what are you referring to when you’re writing and talking about “community?”
My definition is going to be loosey goosey-er than most; when I’m talking about community, I could be talking about something on as small a scale as the group of friends you get together with once a month for dinner all the way to an organization made up of dozens of people who you volunteer alongside every week. It’s any group of people who you feel some sort of belonging with and responsibility to. I keep this definition broad because the skills required across these spaces feel the same to me, even if their scale or clarity of purpose is wildly different. When we see it all under the same big circus tent, it gives us more opportunities to practice being the sort of person we want to be, rather than feeling like community is only this one tightly defined thing that we’re always chasing but never really experiencing.
You describe GROUP HUG as “focused on [the] mysterious, magical, unpredictable human funk that makes being in community with other people a wonderful or awful thing!” In addition to being my all-time favorite newsletter tagline, it gets at this deeper truth: being in relationship and in community is messy. And GROUP HUG is messy in the best possible way.
All of that’s a long wind up to ask: How did you arrive at this approach for GROUP HUG? What are your dreams for the newsletter?
I've been hooked on the magic of other people my whole life. I grew up going to shows and organizing DIY arts collectives, and have been lucky to steward communities in my paid work as well. Most recently, I have been organizing with a bike co-op in New Haven. When I first joined the co-op, the volunteer base would try to make decisions together, sometimes by consensus. We would have big, open group discussions. We would try to make really thorny, unanswerable governance decisions on a daily basis. And it would absolutely rattle me. Sometimes, I’d think back on conversations that would make me feel like someone hated me, and that would make me stressed about going back to the meeting again. Other times, I felt elated and loved the energy of facilitating a hard conversation. It was an emotional rollercoaster every time.
I remember in that time — 2021 and 2022 — when I really craved resources or frameworks that addressed all of the feelings that made it hard to continue showing up to these community spaces. I got to this point of thinking, “Everyone loves to talk about how we need a third space, but it really doesn't matter if we show up to that space and are still drowning in our emotional experiences that make us never want to return.” I could point to 10 little frameworks that show you how to build the right size and structure of community. But none of them also spoke to what to do when you feel so upset about a bad meeting that you can't stop thinking about it for a week. We might be used to these feelings at our work, and have developed a shared understanding of “it’s just a job” – but what about community spaces and friendships we hope to enjoy for years? The ones that we hope will permeate our lives in deep, constant ways?
GROUP HUG is primarily about all the things we feel when we're in community with other people. And because I’m a facilitator and gathering freak at heart, it also includes actionable reframes on things like meeting structures or facilitation or getting together. It cuts across many community contexts because I believe we take ourselves with us across these contexts. This is a philosophical shift: I'm actually the same person at the co-op as I am when I'm volunteering with a parks group, as I am when I am planning a dinner party. I believe it’s important to carry over our philosophies and principles throughout all of these settings.
This relates to my big dream for GROUP HUG: to shift our very philosophies about what it takes to build community. I’m starting to do that by building out the GROUP HUG ecosystem beyond the newsletter. I put on my first event last week, which was just an hour to co-work and for people to do things like submit a volunteer form or write out a plan for an event series they want to host — essentially, de-shaming the fact that it can be hard to do these things, and also honoring the space it takes to make them happen. The dream is to shift the very posture it takes to build community, and then to play around with all these different resources — zines, toolkits, and events to help people make that shift if they want it.
I really appreciate this emphasis on feelings and ways of being instead of frameworks and “how-to” lists. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we can learn (or re-learn) new ways of being, particularly for rebuilding civic life over the next 50 years. What ways of being do you see us called to step into? And what ways of being, if any, are we called to let go of?
On the granular level, the answer to this question can be very different for everybody. So much of what we’re talking about is the process of reflecting on yourself and your embodied experience, noticing what comes up for you when you're in space with other people, and thinking about where else in your life you have experienced similar feelings (i.e. group projects in middle school, being friend-broken-up-with, etc). Then it’s going back to these spaces and paying enough attention to what’s happening that you are able to identify it and work on it. In order to even introspect on those feelings, you need to be showing back up.
So rather than a perfect step-by-step list for rebuilding civic life, I think about concepts like “endurance” and “resilience” and “curiosity” and “bias towards action.” It takes a willingness to go to something the first time, and, if it’s not perfect but you want to be the type of person who keeps showing up, you might need to be able to endure it and feel some discomfort. It takes resilience to be able to fight with people, have awkwardness in friendships, and keep showing back up anyway. As for what we might let go of: bailing quickly on things, or being quick to make assumptions or judgments about community spaces. All of this depends on where you're at in your journey. You may really want to be a part of a space that has a bunch of other people with your exact lived experience, and you may never reach beyond this for valid reasons (safety, your own capacity, etc.). But if we want to be cultivating community — particularly bridged communities across different life experiences and backgrounds and identities — we're going to have to build a bit of that grit and that tolerance for discomfort.
The “human funk” and fundamental “messiness” of community seem to run counter to the concept of “control,” which is so embedded in processes like planning, management, and evaluation. It’s also something that I struggle with across all different facets of my life (community included). How do you approach the relationship between community and control in your own work?
Totally! I find control comes up for me specifically when I’m being asked to hold or design space for people. Often, that role is about creating a plan and agenda, but then it can make you forget that the whole point of it is not about you; it is about creating the conditions for other people to do their thing. I have had to wrestle with that in myself: how am I not accidentally reinforcing a reliance on me and creating more of a planning burden on me, but genuinely enabling other people through the conditions that I'm creating?
Leaning into the messiness of people also asks us to think about different ways of moving away from control, and more towards viewing our task as giving the room what it needs. This, by the way, is as important for facilitators as it is for any of us simply participating in a meeting or working alongside others. I’ve been really intrigued by emergent planning and unconference formats because they are built on this philosophy. I read once about a conference that had no plan on day two: the second day was completely dictated by what happened on the first day. That terrifies me to read, and I think that's a good thing. It makes you ask yourself: “What would I do differently if I was allowing this to go where the room needs it to go?” That’s a stark contrast to the idea that “The only right way to go is through me.”
This thread of “control” starts to get into the territory of “optimization.” Along those lines, you wrote one of my favorite pieces of 2024, “What We Lose When Optimizing Community,” which very much feels like it built upon one of your earlier pieces, “The Friendship-Industrial Complex.” As someone who was ranting about the “Privatization of Community” for years, both essays spoke to my soul. Can you share a bit about what you think happens when we commodify, optimize, and scale community?
The two biggest threats with the privatization of community — which I see as any effort that paywalls a social experience, like a club, friendship bootcamp, or any product or service that promises connection for a fee — are that it creates monocultures and enables people to profit off of loneliness (which just makes me mad). And when I say paywalled, I mean paywalled. Some of the examples I shared in my piece were quite exclusive — social clubs and gathering spaces to belong to that cost $200-plus per month, and actual bootcamps on how to make friends at a similar price point.
I worry about what this is doing to us at a cognitive level. There’s this subtle implication that there’s one “right way” to do community, that our need for friendship is an individual-level problem to solve, and that we can only find these things we all deserve for free — friendship and community — if we can pay for it. It also keeps us passive. The fee-for-service exchange is a more passive approach to this collective challenge than addressing it in a way that is free, accessible, and creates positive byproducts for many of us to enjoy.
The people who tend to purchase things are not bad or stupid for doing it. Loneliness is extremely painful. It’s also easy to feel uncertain about how to navigate the lack of social infrastructure that we currently have in the U.S. There will always be other books to buy, and there will always be other bootcamps to sign up for. But none of them are the same as showing up to something like a writing club at your local coffee spot and just giving it a try for free.
Mariame Kaba, who is an organizer and educator in Chicago, wrote a piece after the election, saying something along the lines of: “There are endless resources out there for you on how to organize, how to find community, and how to build important things with each other. I'm not sure what else you need.” And I thought, “Yes, this is it!” It’s this gap where many of us understand the importance of community, but many of us do not muster the ability to participate in it. To me, this all comes back to the thing we do most, which is shop and browse. These privatized solutions fit into that consumptive way of being more than what we don't practice — going to a new place, creating our own mechanisms for connection, encountering a lot of unknowns, and having to talk to people we don't already know. Those are not practices that we’re literally spending hours doing every day in the same way we are logging hours browsing and shopping.
You’re making me think about the concept of “transactionality,” too. Is the community group — whether it be a business, a nonprofit, or an informal group — treating me as a passive customer to be served? Or, is it treating me as an active member who has real responsibilities for shaping its future?
Perhaps what we’re touching on is less about the structures of any of these places, and more about the feelings and values that they engender in us? For example, I often think about the importance of agency in community. We require a sense of agency to feel like we can show up to something. After we show up, it requires a sense of agency to start inviting others to participate. And even further, it requires agency and confidence for us to take on a leadership role — maybe hosting our own events, making cool flyers, or being the one who offers to bake some wildly good cookies for the meeting. Agency is essential in our community spaces for everyone, not just hosts, facilitators, or leaders.
I think about stories of unions cultivating agency for their members. At first, union members may not feel like they have a ton of power or social capital. But, through the process of door-knocking, canvassing, organizing, and striking, they experience a sense of agency that is about more than just winning. It’s a transformational process that changes people for the rest of their lives. On a lesser level, I think that happens for us, socially, when we belong to places that are geared towards cultivating curiosity, dignity, and agency in all of us.
If you're going to these premium experiences and feeling this transactionality — like it’s hard to connect and nothing is really happening organically — it's probably because these solutions are not engineered to deliver on what we need in community. By virtue of being humans, we know intuitively how to connect and be in community. It makes me mad when it feels as if these ways of connecting have been stolen from us and are being repackaged and sold back to us. You don't need to pay anybody to learn how to have a block party; you're allowed to just try your best, mess up, and learn for next time.
Let’s close, selfishly, with a question I often wrestle with. Throughout this interview, you’ve talked about how you both write GROUP HUG and organize a bunch of stuff in your community like the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op. How do you think about the relationship (and potential tensions) between practicing community and writing about it?
Doing anything with community in person is a meditation for me. I know people often say, “I'm not writing for you, I'm writing for me,” but I really do process a lot of my stuff through GROUP HUG. For instance, I wrote a piece recently on not canceling your gatherings even when things are going terribly in the world, which is something I grapple with all the time. I call myself a coward in that post, because I am! I feel like my instinct is always to be like, “Oh! Avoid! Avoid!” But because GROUP HUG has this basic thesis that we can better show up with others when we honestly name what is so awful and joyful about it all, I'm able to remind myself of my own values. I’m always remembering what I feel inside my sometimes cowardly heart, which is that there's a part of me that always wants to bail and run away and cancel. But this is in direct tension with the person I want to be, which is someone who is reliable and loving and expansive. Once I'm writing, I come up with so many ideas that are helpful to me, and I'm like, “Ah, you had the answer in you all along, didn’t you?”
Sometimes I ask myself if I’m doing enough community-building work in my day-to-day to justify writing about it. I’m also nervous to play into the dynamic I critique around endless talking/writing about the thing but less doing of the thing. I want to stay honest, and I want to keep pushing myself to be the type of person I'm encouraging others to be. But in many ways, I feel that one hand washes the other: writing GROUP HUG inspires me to do more in my community. That’s because I am naming and processing what makes it hard. By being honest about what makes this work challenging on a body and soul level — instead of holding community up as this cartoonish, Sesame Street-y ideal that is easy and perfect all the time — I hope to validate the frightened, petty, pissy versions of ourselves so that we can embrace them, and move on to being the loving, compassionate people we might want to be.
Deeply insightful. Thank you.