People like being with people, even introverts! When lockdowns started in March, no one knew how long they would last. And in Melbourne, the duration certainly exceeded all expectations! This has proved to be a time where many have experienced feelings of loneliness.
When it started I wanted to do something to help foster community in the online space.
I run an instagram page targeted towards 18-35 year old Adventist young adults which currently has over 1500 followers from around the world. I started wondering how I could use this platform to help people find community in the virtual world. After seeing a few Instagram pages run their own versions of “speed friending,” I was inspired to try this out too.
I asked my followers if this is something they would be interested in, and the overwhelming majority said yes! We had over 160 expressions of interest from all over the world; South Africa, Brazil, Germany, China, USA, Kenya, Canada South Africa and more! Over the course of seven weeks, I ran six sessions of “Community Connect” and we had over 60 people participate from fifteen countries.
Participants would meet together on zoom and following a brief introduction, each person would have seven mins to talk to someone before moving to the next person.
The feedback from the Community Connect sessions was encouraging; people enjoyed meeting others that they would not have otherwise met.
Adversity begets creativity. This is not something I would have tried, had we not been in this COVID season.
Community can be fostered in the online space and this venture showed me that this is an area which has a lot of potential. I am looking forward to developing this into the future – whatever that may look like!
Rosemary Andrykanus