Crafting Community

Swampy Origins

Creatives Club started in March 2022 out of my desire to meet new people and finish more projects. My partner and I had moved to Washington, DC a year earlier and still didn't quite have the kind of community I was hoping for, but I also wasn't at home working on projects in the time this community wasn't forming. It wasn't that I was completely without community—we had reconnected with some friends in the city and I tried to regularly attend a Friday meetup organized by some folks on the local subreddit. I met some great people, although I often felt a bit socially aimless. I try really hard not to ask people about their work in social situations, and in a place like DC where work is so often prioritized, that felt like an especially important boundary. Regardless, I still often felt myself in situations where someone was either explaining something about their job to a group of folks that was not entirely interested or someone was being asked about their job when they clearly didn't want to talk about it. It was moments like these when I would find myself wondering if I should have stayed home to work on whatever project was holding my attention at the time.

Eventually I learned that there were some other regulars at these events that also had projects they wanted to commit more time to working on: learning to draw, writing a stand-up routine, etc. I had the idea of a new meetup that would essentially be a co-working session for folks working on creative projects. I floated the idea of meeting at a regular time at the same coffee shop every week.

But how regular? The weekly happy hours had showed me the power of a weekly meetup to enable folks to get to know each other. Most of the creative meetups I've attended have been monthly, and I personally feel like that frequency is hard to keep track of, and missing a meetup means you go a minimum of two months without seeing people, which is a long time when you're trying to get to know people. So weekly it would be! I decided Thursdays would be a good day because it's close enough to the weekend that people might feel more encouraged to stay out late, but not on a weekend day that people are more likely to have other plans.

Choosing a location was harder. There honestly weren't that many options to choose from. Breweries are hard to come by in DC, and most cafes close before (or shortly after) folks get off work. Accessibility to public transit is also a consideration, since so much of the DMV commutes without a car. We started at a community table at a cafe called Tryst that turns into a bar, so it stays open late enough for us to get a few hours in after work on a week night. Eventually we moved to a restaurant/bar that had a slightly bigger community table that could accommodate 15 of us. Luckily when we outgrew that space, the central public library in DC announced that they were extending their hours, and we were able to reserve rooms there for free. That eventually led to a partnership with The Labs (the library makerspace in the basement), and they are willing to host us there every week in the winter, no reservation necessary! As of March 2026, The Labs continue to be the winter home of CC in DC, although in nice weather, every other meetup takes place at a very special community garden and outdoor events space called Temperance Alley Garden.

Mixing digital and physical

Since CC started as a branch of a group that came together from weekly posts on Reddit, it was naturally that the club would continue to interface with Reddit in some way. This was intentional. I think Reddit is unique in that it continues to host forums centered on specific geographic locations. Most cities will have at least one local subreddit where folks will post local news stories and events and have discussions about things either happening in the city, or things of note to folks living in or nearby the city. I think this is special because we are increasing living in a world where our digital lives are more disconnected from our physical communities as people spend more time with feed-based platforms that are filled less with people they choose and more with algorithmic content. These subreddits are a way for people to use the internet to connect them more with their physical surroundings rather than further isolate them.

It is common on subreddits like these for folks to ask questions about the city, and among those questions, you often see folks asking how to make friends. I kept an eye out for posts like these, and would mention the weekly CC meetup if the poster mentioned an interest in any creative pursuits.

Eventually we needed a place to put updates, especially once we consistently had enough people that we needed to consider other locations. Luckily we were faced with the question of a new location as the weather was getting warmer, so we were able to move our meetup to the National Mall, the big park in DC between the Smithsonian museums. But we needed to tell people how to find us, so we made an Instagram page where I would post a weekly announcement graphic with a little map showing where we would be sitting in the park in relation to some landmarks.

Making an Instagram page had the added benefit of more discoverability. I had the idea that following a bunch of local businesses, museums, and other groups might encourage Instagram's algorithms to suggest our page to other people that follow similar accounts, and that seemed to be the case. We had new people following the page daily and many of the members would tell us the page was suggested to them on Instagram.

At about this same time, I was using a Discord server to stay in touch with some of my artist friends that I had made by interacting on social media during the pandemic lockdowns. Discord was nice because it lets you have multiple parallel chats for different topics, so we would have one general chat, a chat for sharing our art, another for sharing memes, etc. I thought it might be nice to have a similar space for CC since it would allow people to follow up with others from meetups and share finished photos of whatever they were working on. Eventually it also became a place where people could share other events that were happening in the area, art related or not.

What happens when people move away?

Getting the Discord server set up made me realize that it could also serve the purpose of being a sort of community uniter once people move away. DC is a very transient place in the sense that people are always moving there, staying for short stints, then moving away. I thought that if somebody that moved to DC liked CC enough then moved away, then they could start a new chapter of CC in their new city and share certain parts of the club, especially the active Discord server. There are certain parts of the server where folks don't necessarily need to be in the same place to interact (e.g. sharing art and memes), so as long as the areas that are dependent on locality (e.g. meetup chats and events) are separated by city, the other parts of the server could be shared across cities.

New cities

In August of 2024, my wife and I moved back to Colorado. I knew I wanted to start a new chapter there, and what ended up happening was that I started two. We first moved to Denver, where I started scoping out potential locations to host a meetup. One potential location was a new coffee shop that had just opened up in July. The coffee shop was called Art Club Coffee, so I had a feeling they might be interested in a collaboration. It turns out that the owners, Dot and Jamie, were really interested in making their shop a community space, but had been busy with the business side of things and hadn't had the time yet to focus on community building. They were willing to host us! Not only weekly, but outside their usual operating hours, too! We had our first meetup in September and have had a weekly meetup almost every week since then.

In October, we moved to Boulder, about 45 minutes away by car. By this point, my friend Earl had started helping me organize the Denver meetups, and agreed to take on the main hosting responsibility so that I could try starting up another chapter in Boulder. There wasn't a perfect cafe in Boulder, but we did find a brewery that wasn't too busy on Thursday nights. I reached out to them on social media, and they welcomed us to host our weekly meetup there.

Some recent graphics!

I post weekly graphics on Instagram to announce our meetups (even though they're at the same place and time). Here are some good graphics from the last few weeks!

Thanks for reading!