A few years ago, I got an email from two documentary filmmakers, Pete Davis and Rebecca Davis. They were making a film about why Americans have stopped joining things, built around the work of a social scientist named Robert Putnam. Would I be a part of it?
I’d read Putnam’s groundbreaking work, Bowling Alone, in college. My mother is also an anthropologist who spent her career studying social capital, so the term had been sitting at our dinner table my whole life. Someone was trying to make this nerdy, but crucial concept cool and relatable, and accessible? Deal me in.
That film became Join or Die, and it premiered at SXSW in 2023. And it turns out the film they’d been working on for ten years has become central to the moment we’re in as a country now.
Pete and Rebecca generously gave GROUP LIFERS access to the full film this week. If you haven’t watched yet, you have one more day! Group Lifers can scroll down to watch. (And if you want to become a Group Lifer, let me help you out.)
Earlier this week, I sat down with Pete and Rebecca for a Substack Live. We talked about what they learned making the film, what’s surprised them since it came out, and what it will actually take to reverse a decline they’ve now spent almost a decade studying.
1. Though we’ve largely stopped “joining” as a nation over the past half-century — like forests — we can invest in reforestation. Pete describes civic life as an ecosystem: “It’s like a rainforest… a major tree starts falling down, and then suddenly you wake up 50 years later, and there’s a desert.” But ecosystems don’t just collapse and end. They can be re-forested, one seed at a time. And starting — or joining — just one little group can lead to reforestation of civic life. Take Sheri, who moved to Minneapolis in her sixties, knowing no one, put up a single flyer for a journaling club in a coffee shop. Seven months later, it’s still meeting, and has become an unexpected civic boon during the ICE raids in that city. Pete shared the example of a CrossFit gym in South Brooklyn that started as a place to work out and, by paying attention to who showed up and what their needs actually are, has sprouted a parents’ group, a 12-step meeting, a stand-up comedy night, and even a dog fundraiser that’s raised half a million dollars. “Every organization is also the soil for future organizations,” he said. You don’t plant a forest. You plant one seed and watch what grows out of it.
2. Convening power is one of the most underrated forms of actual power. An organizer recently told me that if you can regularly convene 50 or more people once a month, you’re one of the most powerful groups in the city. In The Art of Gathering, I write, “In countries descending into authoritarianism, one of the first things to go is the right to assemble. Why? Because of what can happen when people come together, exchange information, inspire one another, test out new ways of being together.” Your power is your social capital, your relational power, your ability to pick up the phone and have people on the other end ready to jump with you. It’s not magic. It’s repetition. So, dear reader, use your power and gather, gather, gather. Join, join, join.
3. Gather your tinder now, long before you need a spark. Pete’s favorite example is the opening of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom. In the first two chapters of the book, before King ever gets to the boycott, he lists every club already active in Montgomery: the church, the Bricklayers Union, the NAACP chapter. Rosa Parks had been secretary of that NAACP chapter for ten years before the boycott. She wasn’t chosen at random. She’d, as Pete put it, “been gathering tinder for years.” History remembers the spark. Pete wants us to remember something else: “Who I want to celebrate are the people 20 years before the spark happened who started.”
4. The smallest room can spark a movement. Pete and Rebecca shared the documentary How to Survive a Plague, which has footage of the earliest ACT UP meetings: a small group gathering every Monday night on the Lower East Side that grew and grew and grew. That room changed how the FDA studied and approved treatment for an entire disease. As Pete put it, “It started with people joining a meeting on Monday nights, that’s it. They knew where it was. They knew where to be.”
5. Ask yourself: What are you doing alone that you could be doing together? Instead of just adding one more thing to your already-busy calendar, Rebecca has a total reframe: what could you do in the company of others? Shopping! Clothes swaps. Errands. Laundry. Rotating child care. Cooking. Meal prep.
6. Coordination is not a small thing. It’s most of the thing. Pete’s sister’s D.C. neighborhood built a shared map and events board so neighbors could actually find each other’s gatherings. None of that sounds radical. But it is. Coordination and infrastructure ease our ability to come together. (And, we talked about the exciting experiment launched this week by Chicago Public Media, Chicago.com, to help do just that.)
7. A group doesn’t have to last forever to matter. One of the things that surprised me as I researched for my next book, The Art of Fighting, is that great groups do end. And just because something “only” lasts three years doesn’t mean it wasn’t a powerful vehicle for those in it for that period of time. And that it didn’t change the people in it through the formation in that moment. In fact, it did its work.
As Pete shared, Putnam noticed that with the rise of technology and television, “we started watching Friends, instead of having friends.”
At the beginning of the Live, I asked everyone, “If you could wave a magic wand and join one thing this week, what would it be, and what’s stopping you from just doing it?”
The chat flooded: a tired dad’s paddle club, all-women’s dance parties, a casual singing group, the Canadian Olympic hockey team, a sewing club.
I’m curious… What would you join? And what would it take for you to just do it? Consider this your dare to take one step this summer.
As always,
Priya
