The Dandelion Creative: October 2011

What started as an idea to do something quickly grew to bigger ideas, and now WE'VE DONE SOMETHING. Cool right? Yes - very cool! Here's how it worked:

The tiny seed of an idea that started all of this was to get people together and create something - anything really - with the goal of building community and sparking inspiration. I think that it's interesting that communities are often formed or strengthened when people get together to work towards a common goal - like supporting a cause or a political candidate. But how often do we find time to get together to do something just because it brings us joy? I wanted to create a space and structure that would let us do that, and encourage others to do so too.

So What's the Structure?

It's pretty simple really. You just need to come up with an idea for a project that you'd like to do (for our first project it was fill in the blank t-shirts), then invite some people over to help you with the project. To help build community, it's important to bring together a diverse group of people (ideally folks who don't already know each other well) AND ask each of them to invite one other person (ideally someone they don't know well, but would like to know better). Once everyone arrives, you get busy with your project. At the end of the event, hopefully people will have had fun working together and getting to know each other, and they will be inspired not only by participating in creating something cool, but also by the idea of replicating this structure themselves. And so the idea will continue (the way dandelions spread).

Our First Project - Fill in the Blank T-shirts:

For the first project we created fill in the blank t-shirts. Our "project goal" was to create 100 fill in the blank T-shirts that we could hand out at the Pride parade.