Culture of Convening just passed 100 subscribers!
When we started this in April, we were two people who had spent decades in rooms of every kind, from boardrooms to church basements to national and international convenings, finally ready to write down what we had learned. We had a tagline, a list of ideas from a two-day retreat, and no idea whether anyone would read it.
Thousands of you did, and 100 of you subscribed. We are pretty honored–thank you!
What You Actually Did
We want to be specific, because “thank you for subscribing” undersells what has happened here:
You commented on our posts
You forwarded pieces to colleagues and to your teams
You pushed back on some of our concepts
You added your own stories in the replies
Several of you named dynamics we had completely missed, and those comments have already changed how we think about this work.
Tamieka Atkins of ProGeorgia named the funder-driven panel: the session nobody voted for, but somebody paid for. Amy Pritchard, ❌👑 of GAIN Power, launched a survey to ask future participants in their RootsCamp conference about the conference design, and her self-professed love for conferences (us too!)
We write a lot about the difference between being invited and belonging. If an invitation gets someone in the room, belonging is what keeps them there–and belonging is a system, not a feeling.
What you have given us is a sense of belonging. You did not just subscribe, but you showed up and showed out, and that means a lot to us both.
Now the Honest Part
We had planned to launch something this week. In our last piece, we told you we had been building a full guide to 28 convening formats, defined through the Culture of Convening lens. And it was supposed to drop now tuuuuuday! But it is not ready.
A member of our team experienced an unexpected emergency, and we decided to adjust our timeline and launch it in September.
Moving the launch was an easy decision, not because we wanted to, but because we believe so deeply in our work as conveners, care bears, and leadership architects that a pause may have been exactly what we all needed as we nestle into the end of summer.
We are telling you this for two reasons. The first is that you deserve to know why the thing we promised is not here yet.
The second is that this is exactly what we write about.
Pivoting Is Not Failing
Every convener eventually faces the same fork in the road: the plan breaks, and you get to choose whether to push through or pivot.
Pushing through has a lot going for it. You announced a date, and people are expecting it. The content calendar said this was the date, so we have to do it. But these are false choices. Pivoting can feel like failure, especially when the plan was good, and the work was almost done.
But we keep coming back to the same two questions we ask about every convening: what is the intent, and who is being centered?
If the intent is to publish a guide about designing convenings that honor the people in the room, and getting it out on time requires asking someone to push through a personal emergency, then the guide contradicts itself before anyone reads it. The deadline would have been centering us. Not our colleague.
We have written that logistics are not separate from the program, and that a tradition that no longer serves the people it was built for is just inertia. A self-imposed deadline is its own kind of tradition. It felt urgent, but ultimately, it was not.
We will be honest about one more thing. We had planned to record a video for this post, but we BOTH are tired. We are both exhausted from our day jobs and our passion projects, and we needed to take a beat. So we wrote instead. Same message, different format, and a small reminder that the container should serve the people making it too.
What Is Coming
The Convening Formats Guide is still coming! Don’t count us out!
We are not going to give you a date this time, because we would rather get it right than get it fast.
In the meantime: more pieces, more Convening Hours, and a deeper dive into individual formats. We also have a tool in development that we are genuinely excited about, but we have learned our lesson about announcing timelines, so that is all we will say for now.
100 people is not a huge number in the grand scheme of Substacks and the competitiveness of the internet, but it is a real one. We never did this to have thousands of subscribers; we started this to find our people–the conveners. Every subscriber is more than just a follower; you are building something special, and we want to build a community of people who want to get this right together.
Thank you for letting us into your inbox and thank you for being in the room. See you next week!
Love,
Carmen & Gregory
