5 Ways to Quickly Build Belonging
5 Ways to Quickly Build Belonging
I recently visited Madison, Wisconsin to speak at their Chamber of Commerce's 75th annual dinner. They’d gathered 500 leaders from local businesses and non-profits alongside cultural change makers. It was a grand and – if we’re being honest – intimidating room.
When I arrived, I was greeted by a sprawling map of Madison with the word “BELONG” written across the top accompanied by large spools of yellow, orange, and pink yarn. Before entering the dining room, guests were asked to select some yarn from the spool that corresponded with their generation, and then weave their chosen thread around designated pegs that each represented their response to a different question about their connection to the city.
As I surveyed the evolving web of bright yarn, I was surprised that a significant portion of guests across every generation — all people deeply invested in this city — were not actually from Madison.
The organizers had accomplished something remarkable. Within minutes, and without saying a word, they established a sense of belonging without requiring all of their guests to be the same. They found a visual representation that said: you don’t have to be from here, to be a part of here.
When most of us enter a room or a Zoom, we’re scanning: Who are these folks? What does it mean to be successful here? Which parts of myself can I show here? Do I belong here?
In our gatherings, it’s easy to confuse “belonging” for “sameness.” Belonging is about more than just our shared connections or interests: it’s about feeling a part of the whole without having to all be the same.
Creating a sense of belonging is at the heart of meaningful gatherings. It creates an environment where guests feel valued, understood, and accepted. It allows us to open up and participate. Without it, gatherings can feel alienating or superficial. The best gatherers I’ve seen nurture belonging through subtle and even playful cues.
Here are 5 creative ways to infuse a sense of belonging into your gatherings:
1. Get skin in the game.
When Lina got engaged, she wanted to throw an engagement party that wasn’t just a kickoff to wedding planning, but a celebration of the life she and her fiancé had built together. She was Taiwanese, he was Portuguese, and their friends were an equally diverse group that didn’t all know each other. How to bring them all together and celebrate the richness that all these different backgrounds brought to their life? She decided on a potluck at their house and instructed everyone to “bring a dish that reminds you of home.” The night of, over plates of peanut noodles, mac and cheese, lumpia, jollof rice, meatballs in vodka sauce, and banoffee pie, their friends joyfully swapped stories with strangers about their recipes and the people who’d taught them how to cook them. Though celebrating ostensibly their engagement, Lina found a way to say to their friends we are each and all part of this many ways of being together. In having their friends bring (and then share) the dish, they co-created an evening and pulled them closer to their own mixed union.
2. Give your gathering a relational name.
Names create social contracts. The best ones help us understand our roles, and help us to understand that we’re a part of something. When Jancee Dunn hosted a Worn Out Mom’s Hootenanny, everyone who received that invitation realized they were being invited into a circle. Sometimes adding a number also creates a sense of how guests complete the whole. “A Table for Six” or “15 Toasts” implicitly counts each guest to make the evening complete. By naming the gathering on the invitation and repeating the name in reminder emails, you create a sense of belonging before anyone enters the room.Names create social contracts. The best ones help us understand our roles, and help us to understand that we’re a part of something. When Jancee Dunn hosted a Worn Out Mom’s Hootenanny, everyone who received that invitation realized they were being invited into a circle. Sometimes adding a number also creates a sense of how guests complete the whole. “A Table for Six” or “15 Toasts” implicitly counts each guest to make the evening complete. By naming the gathering on the invitation and repeating the name in reminder emails, you create a sense of belonging before anyone enters the room.
3. Create a pop-up mission.
When my stepfather’s 80th birthday party was canceled because of Covid, my mother pivoted to Zoom. She extended the invitation to 80 friends. Then she panicked. What am I going to do with all these people? How do I help them feel like they can contribute in this flattened form? She broke the group up into smaller "cocktail lounges" and tasked each group to come up with a limerick for John, something my stepfather has always done for others. When folks came back to the main room, started reciting the hilarious limericks, and recognized their beloved birthday boy in them, they also realized that they really were meant to be there.
4. Invent roles beyond just “host” and “guest.”
We’re often afraid to burden people by asking them for help, but here’s the thing: when you help build something, you become a part of it. And it can be tiny. It can be super low stakes. A friend walked into a big house party where he didn’t know many people on a hot day, kind of nervous. The frantic host looked at him and said, “Gaston, do you mind running out and getting some ice from the bodega across the street?” His face lit up. A role! A job! He brought the ice. We begin to belong to something when we take ownership or responsibility in micro-moments.
Another friend bypassed the stiffness of a formal wedding party by asking three close friends who didn’t know each other if they’d team up and bake a couple of sheets of brownies for her wedding day. The three dubbed themselves “The Great Brooklyn Bake Off,” and now vacation together annually. Giving the right people the right roles gives them something to do, but it also gets a higher proportion of your guests to be oriented towards caring for other guests.
5. Introduce some friendly competition.
You know what creates a sense of belonging in a group almost immediately? The permission to compete. And belonging doesn’t just come from being part of a team, it also comes from playing against another team. One of my readers wrote to me about pitting the generations in their sprawling, extended family against each other for Family Feud. Teams responded to questions like “Who’s the most frugal?” or “Who’s the most likely to win America’s Got Talent?” with different family members’ names. The result? Hilariously competitive arguments about whether Aunt Gail or Cousin John was most likely to win a talent competition. They found a simple collective mechanism to bring some joy and banter to the group, but also implicitly tease out memories and stories and shared context. Oh, we are this.
As Always,
Priya
ICYMI
I had the pleasure of interviewing Rhaina Cohen about her new book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, at the Greenlight Bookstore last week in Brooklyn. Rhaina has penned a provocative new book that has a lot of folks chattering about what it means to build community, and how we think about “people who make deliberate decisions to organize their lives around each other.” It’s a great read.
Inspirations
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out.
Derek Thompson takes on American loneliness and our “ritual recession.” He writes: “The rise of aloneness is a part of the erosion of America’s social infrastructure. Someone once told me that the best definition of community is ‘where people keep showing up.’ Well, where is that now, exactly?” Read the full story here.
Milton Glaser's Childcraft
Thanks to AOG reader Melina who shared this story with me about the embodied entrance of a beloved toy store (and a very special entrance for the littlest visitors) designed by Milton Glaser. Rather than stuff the shelves with merchandise to sell, he created a space devoted to the kinds of fantastical childhood daydreams that toys inspire– complete with piped-in noises of planes, trains, and thunderstorms. Read about it here.
I Wasn't Sure How to Celebrate Turning 70. Then I Sent An Email That Changed My Entire Year
Instead of fretting over guest lists and having one more holiday-timed party, Megan Vered sent a different kind of invitation to her friends to mark her 70th. “I would log 70 experiences during the year with the people I love. Their job: to propose. My job: to say yes.” This, please. More of this.
