By Nathan Young
The time has come. I’m ready to start pulling together the first cohorts and begin planning events more in earnest. I’m sending this email to share a handful more details and see who’s interested in helping to plan the first couple of months of events.
As I’ve been saying at the meetings and previous emails, I really want to invite input from all of you with regards to this new iteration of the New Narrative, the experiences we create, the topics we cover, and the way we bring it all together. My hope is that through this cohort plan, it creates opportunities to get involved and leave your mark without having to make an overwhelming or extended commitment for any of you.
You can read the full plan on the link below but here is the basic gist of it:
- The cohort would be a 6-week commitment in addition to any specific roles you decide to take on with events.
- The outcome we’ll be working towards is planning a set of programming around a specific theme for a month.
- We’ll be doing a lot of talking and sharing amongst ourselves about what the theme means to us, the opportunities and challenges of the theme, our own personal experiences, and how we can create conversations around this theme for others too.
- There will be one 2 hour meeting per week and 1-3+ additional hours of writing exercises, research, planning, and side projects in between each meeting too.
- Starting out I’m going to leave it all very flexible so I can get a feel of what commitment level works for everybody and I’ll be there every step of the way to personally see things through as need be too.
- Here’s the description with the full plan. Feel free to leave comments if you have thoughts too: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11N1BOVU1AogOrQeQbLs1b6ykNNkvoX8SQacz5ot5ARg/edit?usp=sharing
And here are the first four themes I was envisioning.
August: Community
September: Connection
October: Gratitude
November: Resilience
I know one of the internal discussions we had was around not sticking too heavily to positive themes, but each positive theme also has its negative counterparts. We’ll want to discuss and explore those too. The theme of Connection can definitely include a discussion on Anger. The theme of Gratitude can definitely include a discussion on Resentment. The overarching themes are more to guide us internally. We’ll want to find ways to explore them from many different directions. The wider audience will certainly see the theme for each event, but they may never be fully aware of the guiding monthly theme, and that’s totally fine.
If you’re interested in being in one of these cohorts, let me know and I’ll follow up with the next steps from there!
August is coming up fast, so we’ll want to get started with that team right away. There may actually be a truncated version of the process for that month with me taking on more of the meat simply because of time. Planning for September will start the 2nd or 3rd week of July. Planning for October will start the 2nd or 3rd week of August, etc, etc
Hopefully this is of interest to a good chunk of you. I’d love cohort teams to be about 4-5 people each.
And if you’ve got an idea for something you want to do that falls outside the scope of what I’m talking about with the cohorts, let me know. I really want to make room for all of us to explore our power and what we can create. Even if it doesn’t happen right away, it’s good to know what folks’ ideas are.
That’s it for now. I hope to hear from some of you soon!
Thanks!
Nathan
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