"Get Together" Podcast Roundup
Learnings from interviews with Tempesty Project, the director of “A Social Distance,” Ivan Cash, & Elena Favilli of “Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls”
The Podcast Roundup is an introduction to ordinary people building extraordinary communities featured on the “Get Together” Podcast.
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Issue #2
Growing a community is not about management. It’s about cultivating leaders.
That theme has come through loud and clear in our most recent podcast interviews:
After releasing the most successful crowdfunded book in literary history, the Rebel Girls team has approached readers as collaborators. In fact, they created the sequel to their first book, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, with 100% crowdsourced stories.
Director Ivan Cash’s film “A Social Distance” took the world by storm earlier this year. He made a film during the pandemic by building with, not for, giving storytelling tools to folks from 30 countries (a 93-year old Malayan grandmother, a 19-year old Slovenian man) during the COVID-19 lockdown and sewing them together into a beautiful film.
The Tempestry Project created a temperature-knitting framework and empowered groups around the world to illustrate the history of climate change through “craft-ivism.”.
Haven’t had the chance to listen? Learn more about each of these new episodes below in our Podcast Roundup and subscribe to listen.
🔥Creating Leaders: A Discussion with Kevin & Bailey
This week we will be taking a deep dive back into growing a community by growing its leaders (Chapters 6 and 7 of our book, Get Together) with our friends at Highlighter. Join Bailey and Kevin Thursday at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET for a town hall. We welcome the readers of our book to come share your ideas with us.
Haven’t read the book? RSVP and you will get an expert to read to help kick start the conversation of growing leaders in your community.
🔊Podcast Roundup
Publishing a book through crowdfunding 💪
Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s book, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, pushed the boundaries of traditional publishing by building with, not for. They co-constructed the collection of stories with the help of 60 collaborators from around the world and $1.2 million from crowd funders, making the book the most crowdfunded campaign in literary history. Today, Rebel Girls has evolved into a community-driven media company that continues to crowdsource the stories they tell of extraordinary historical figures and contemporary women, like Joan Jett, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Maria Sibylla Merian, a 1700s scientist and artist who discovered the metamorphosis of butterflies (before that people thought butterflies appeared out of mud, like magic!).
Editorial note from Maggie:
Elena emphasized the importance of testing ideas with your community and getting feedback from them. For example, her first book, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, started as a newsletter just to see if people were even interested in hearing fairytale-like stories about real women in history and the present day. And then they used Kickstarter as a crowdfunding campaign not just to get investment, but also to gauge peoples’ interest.
🎧Listen on your favorite podcast platform.
Making art to connect strangers 🎨
Ivan Cash is an interactive artist and filmmaker whose work celebrates and inspires connections among strangers. His people-driven art projects—emails transcribed by hand, conversations with strangers on airplanes, a collection of home videos during a pandemic—break a social code and take us below the surface-level.
Editorial note from Bailey:
I didn’t want to interview Ivan because of all of his accolades (Forbes 30 Under 30, Cannes Lions Shortlist, exhibitions in V&A Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum). I wanted to interview Ivan because of the exact nature of his work. You see, Ivan uses storytelling and art to actually bring people together — to connect strangers through small, benevolent collaborations that add up to much more. Community builders seeking to inspire their members with stories have a lot we can learn from Ivan’s methods.
🎧Listen on your favorite podcast platform.
Knitters banding together for climate 🧶
“Tempestries” are temperature data visualized in scarves, wall hangings, and other items. The colors and patterns are not random but a shared code among “craftivists.” Justin Connelly and Emily McNeil have codified this practice into a shared framework and language that cohesively illustrates the history of climate change. They call their effort Tempestry Project.
Editorial note from Mia:
The Tempestry story is a good example of how a community can be really powerful — even more powerful — as a collective unit. Each person does their thing with the kit. But together, the pieces form a history of how the temperature of a place changes over time, and that’s super powerful. Anyone who has even the slightest doubt about climate change can’t deny what’s laid out, in colors, in something they can touch, right there in front of their face.
🎧Listen on your favorite podcast platform.
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