GirlTrek is the largest public health movement and nonprofit for Black women and girls, with 820,000 active members and a 1000 local leaders. The collective was created by Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison. They knew the statistics - 53% of black women are obese. About 90% of black girls are projected to be over a healthy weight by the year 2030.
In 2010, Morgan started walking with her class of 5th graders, then thought. "What if we got their mothers, a million of them, to start walking for better health?" That's what we set out to do.
They started a Facebook page called Healthy Black Women and Girls and encouraged members to commit to walking outdoors for 30 minutes a day. First they got 500 of their friends to walk with them in their neighborhoods for 10 weeks straight, five days a week because they read on the CDC's website that that's what it takes. Before COVID-19, there are more than 800,000 women who are walking with GirlTrek.
Then COVID struck, and they couldn’t walk together.
So they reinvented the challenge format and made it work.
After live, call-in intergenerational conversations with civil rights legends such as Angela Davis and Nikki Giovanni went viral on Facebook, GirlTrek launched its first Black History Bootcamp, a 21-day series of walking meditations to honor freedom fighters such as Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm and Nina Simone as well as less often celebrated women, including Georgia Gilmore, whose secret kitchen helped feed and fund the civil rights movement.
Each introspective walk offers a window into a lively conversation between the two friends while highlighting these inspiring stories
The daily meditations are about 30 minutes: enough time to hike, or simply stroll while absorbing historical and motivating affirmations. And at a time when GirlTrek is encouraging any group walkers to stay six feet apart, it’s the perfect activity to do with others from a distance, or solo.
Black History Bootcamp attracted more than 100,000 participants.
I’ve been helping our United Methodist churches in Western NC move online since the pandemic. It’s pretty inspiring to see the numbers on our zoom dashboard. Since July we’ve had 3,233 meetings across our 324 churches, with over 26,000 in attendance. These numbers represent communities of faith who have prioritized loving their neighbors by following public health guidelines and avoiding in person meetings, even at the peril of budgets and salaries.
I'm part of an online book group called Literarily Wasted that has been really successful. They've done an amazing job building community and helping all feel included. I'm impressed by how active the group is and how engaging it can be even though the only ones on camera are the hosts. The best part is that there is no drama either. It's been wonderful having it, during the pandemic especially. https://www.facebook.com/literarilywasted
The Dinner Party, a worldwide community of 20- and 30-somethings who have each experienced the loss of a parent, partner, child, sibling, other close family member, or close friend, has added 70 new tables since March. One of their members shared, “my virtual table has been like coming home after being out in a storm.”
👀Bailey & Kevin are hosting a live conversation with Carla Fernandez, co-founder, and Mary Horn, community manager, of The Dinner Party, next Friday on how they went virtual.
What is universal across these communities is how much they prioritize relationship building over anything else. Want kids to show up online? Create a community they know they have ownership in.
In the WordPress community, we first tried to simply replicate our in-person events in an online format, but that really didn't work out how we hoped (for reasons that now feel like they should have been obvious from the start). After that we reflected on the primary goal of our events program, which is to educate and inspire people to do more with WordPress, and conceptualised an online learning platform that includes pre-recorded workshops and live, synchronous discussion groups. This is now live at learn.wordpress.org and has been a big hit with the community so far.
We're publishing new workshops and hosting discussion groups across all timezones groups based on the content of those workshops every week. The next stage for the platform, which is almost ready, is to have complete courses that focus on specific, practical learning outcomes. The courses will be a series of the existing workshops with quizzes along the way. The quizzes will serve the dual purpose of allowing people to test/prove their knowledge as well as provide valuable metrics to show the success of the platform.
Once we have more than a few courses live, we're planning on implementing tools to facilitate self-organised cohorts, so people can go through the courses together. I'm _very_ excited for that stage and to see how it all works out!
The site also includes lesson plans that people can use to teach workshops themselves, either in-person or online. All the content on the site is being continually added to and improved.
I was a 100% in person events business at the start of March 2020. We all know how that story goes... Pivot pivot pivot or goodbye. I wasn't sure if a pivot would work but didn't have any other route but to try.
Nine months later, while disappointed at all the cancellations and missing real live faces, success success! Very appreciative that the magic still exists virtually and of an incredibly supportive cheerleading squad who came along with me for the detour (and what now may be the main highway).
Excited to provide "Zooms that don't suck."
A few examples —
Mingler: networking without the networking. Everyone comes solo. An expertly and warmly curated gathering of people you don't know. "The most creative virtual experience I've ever been a part of!"
Sparkle & Shine: “We’re all in this together” virtual cleaning sessions that result in feeling good about yourself and one gorgeous area of your home; with guidance and encouragement, we all clean our own homes.
Cross It Off Club: monthly gatherings where everyone works individually, together. Harnessing the power of group focus and presence and of protected space to get things done (including "silly" things like read a book for pleasure, clean the tub, doodle).
I Can't series: adults state they’re unable to do something, they try it with a bunch of other adults who also “can’t,” and everyone proves themselves wrong and not only does the thing, but enjoys it and says, “That wasn’t so bad. In fact, kinda fun. Good for me! What’s next?!” Adults do the thing they’ve been wanting to do but haven’t done because [insert excuse here]. Yoga, buying a home, drawing, meal prep, budgeting, having a side hustle...
Storytelling Class: an empowering intimate class for those with "no stories" or "uninteresting" stories, or for those who simply want space for community and words
Life of Yes℠ Speaking & Facilitation: an injection of positivity into the workplace. Realistic, simple, actionable steps to create a fulfilled life. Play for play's sake (bonus: makes you a better boss, coworker, employed, peer).
I love what GirlTrek is doing -
GirlTrek is the largest public health movement and nonprofit for Black women and girls, with 820,000 active members and a 1000 local leaders. The collective was created by Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison. They knew the statistics - 53% of black women are obese. About 90% of black girls are projected to be over a healthy weight by the year 2030.
In 2010, Morgan started walking with her class of 5th graders, then thought. "What if we got their mothers, a million of them, to start walking for better health?" That's what we set out to do.
They started a Facebook page called Healthy Black Women and Girls and encouraged members to commit to walking outdoors for 30 minutes a day. First they got 500 of their friends to walk with them in their neighborhoods for 10 weeks straight, five days a week because they read on the CDC's website that that's what it takes. Before COVID-19, there are more than 800,000 women who are walking with GirlTrek.
Then COVID struck, and they couldn’t walk together.
So they reinvented the challenge format and made it work.
After live, call-in intergenerational conversations with civil rights legends such as Angela Davis and Nikki Giovanni went viral on Facebook, GirlTrek launched its first Black History Bootcamp, a 21-day series of walking meditations to honor freedom fighters such as Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm and Nina Simone as well as less often celebrated women, including Georgia Gilmore, whose secret kitchen helped feed and fund the civil rights movement.
Each introspective walk offers a window into a lively conversation between the two friends while highlighting these inspiring stories
The daily meditations are about 30 minutes: enough time to hike, or simply stroll while absorbing historical and motivating affirmations. And at a time when GirlTrek is encouraging any group walkers to stay six feet apart, it’s the perfect activity to do with others from a distance, or solo.
Black History Bootcamp attracted more than 100,000 participants.
I’ve been helping our United Methodist churches in Western NC move online since the pandemic. It’s pretty inspiring to see the numbers on our zoom dashboard. Since July we’ve had 3,233 meetings across our 324 churches, with over 26,000 in attendance. These numbers represent communities of faith who have prioritized loving their neighbors by following public health guidelines and avoiding in person meetings, even at the peril of budgets and salaries.
I'm part of an online book group called Literarily Wasted that has been really successful. They've done an amazing job building community and helping all feel included. I'm impressed by how active the group is and how engaging it can be even though the only ones on camera are the hosts. The best part is that there is no drama either. It's been wonderful having it, during the pandemic especially. https://www.facebook.com/literarilywasted
The Dinner Party, a worldwide community of 20- and 30-somethings who have each experienced the loss of a parent, partner, child, sibling, other close family member, or close friend, has added 70 new tables since March. One of their members shared, “my virtual table has been like coming home after being out in a storm.”
👀Bailey & Kevin are hosting a live conversation with Carla Fernandez, co-founder, and Mary Horn, community manager, of The Dinner Party, next Friday on how they went virtual.
Join us! ---> https://gettogether.world/events/going-virtual-dinner-party
There are many examples within K-12 education. My organization spent time featuring their work in April and May:
https://education-reimagined.org/voyager/voyager-may-2020/
What is universal across these communities is how much they prioritize relationship building over anything else. Want kids to show up online? Create a community they know they have ownership in.
In the WordPress community, we first tried to simply replicate our in-person events in an online format, but that really didn't work out how we hoped (for reasons that now feel like they should have been obvious from the start). After that we reflected on the primary goal of our events program, which is to educate and inspire people to do more with WordPress, and conceptualised an online learning platform that includes pre-recorded workshops and live, synchronous discussion groups. This is now live at learn.wordpress.org and has been a big hit with the community so far.
We're publishing new workshops and hosting discussion groups across all timezones groups based on the content of those workshops every week. The next stage for the platform, which is almost ready, is to have complete courses that focus on specific, practical learning outcomes. The courses will be a series of the existing workshops with quizzes along the way. The quizzes will serve the dual purpose of allowing people to test/prove their knowledge as well as provide valuable metrics to show the success of the platform.
Once we have more than a few courses live, we're planning on implementing tools to facilitate self-organised cohorts, so people can go through the courses together. I'm _very_ excited for that stage and to see how it all works out!
The site also includes lesson plans that people can use to teach workshops themselves, either in-person or online. All the content on the site is being continually added to and improved.
You can check out the platform here: https://learn.wordpress.org/
Since we're a public, open-source community, you can see all the discussion and planning posts here if you're interested in that: https://make.wordpress.org/community/tag/learn-wordpress/
(raises hand)
I was a 100% in person events business at the start of March 2020. We all know how that story goes... Pivot pivot pivot or goodbye. I wasn't sure if a pivot would work but didn't have any other route but to try.
Nine months later, while disappointed at all the cancellations and missing real live faces, success success! Very appreciative that the magic still exists virtually and of an incredibly supportive cheerleading squad who came along with me for the detour (and what now may be the main highway).
Excited to provide "Zooms that don't suck."
A few examples —
Mingler: networking without the networking. Everyone comes solo. An expertly and warmly curated gathering of people you don't know. "The most creative virtual experience I've ever been a part of!"
Sparkle & Shine: “We’re all in this together” virtual cleaning sessions that result in feeling good about yourself and one gorgeous area of your home; with guidance and encouragement, we all clean our own homes.
Cross It Off Club: monthly gatherings where everyone works individually, together. Harnessing the power of group focus and presence and of protected space to get things done (including "silly" things like read a book for pleasure, clean the tub, doodle).
I Can't series: adults state they’re unable to do something, they try it with a bunch of other adults who also “can’t,” and everyone proves themselves wrong and not only does the thing, but enjoys it and says, “That wasn’t so bad. In fact, kinda fun. Good for me! What’s next?!” Adults do the thing they’ve been wanting to do but haven’t done because [insert excuse here]. Yoga, buying a home, drawing, meal prep, budgeting, having a side hustle...
Storytelling Class: an empowering intimate class for those with "no stories" or "uninteresting" stories, or for those who simply want space for community and words
Life of Yes℠ Speaking & Facilitation: an injection of positivity into the workplace. Realistic, simple, actionable steps to create a fulfilled life. Play for play's sake (bonus: makes you a better boss, coworker, employed, peer).
Mac & Cheese Productions℠ ➡ https://macncheeseproductions.com/
Our kids school did a great job: https://www.synapseschool.org/covid-19