Episode 100: Communal Experience - Importance and Relationship to Philanthropy

Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall", your weekly podcast making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and Founder of Hallett philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

Thanks for joining me, Randall, here on "Around with Randall." Today we go into philosophy a little bit and talk about something that I had forgotten about, the power of it at least, and what it means to us. And that's this idea of communal experience. I've been playing with a saying in my head over the last several weeks. We'll see what you think that life is really about individual activity, but living is really truly based and is about communal moments. What inactivity, which I'll talk about here in a second, caused me to really realize, or realize again, or to remember is that things that we do with others is much more important than the things we do by ourselves. Over the long haul that doesn't mean there's not individual goals and accomplishments. That doesn't mean that that we have things we should strive for as individuals, but there's value, huge value, in the idea of communal activity, and we're going to relate this tactically to philanthropy here in a moment.

So communal consumption or experiences is not something new. It may be something you haven't ever thought about but this goes all the way back to hunter-gatherer tribal times, early on in the annals of a, of human history. This is not new. It was actually a function of society that in some ways the group was needed to be together for protection and food and just interaction. Over time we've figured out that there's a science to this communal activity. I steal from Dr Matthew Lieberman at UCLA and their, a neuroscience lab director in their Neuroscience lab, in particular, but that that our brains are built for reward when we have meaningful relationships or interactions with others, and in fact socialize isolation, we think about the the pandemic and we'll talk a little bit more about that here in a moment, can lead to decreased sizes of the hippocampus which then decreases the ability for human beings of learning and or having learning experiences.

In the memory of those experiences it's kind of built into our DNA that we need these communal moments. Typically we find them in these interactions on things in that develop certain kinds of outcomes so if we think about the what the value of communal experiences are it includes like things like identity, and belief systems, and common good, social norms and values, stability. Much of the time comes from a sense of communal experience. Although we'll talk about some negatives there, it's a uniting force for for a group. It actually creates stronger memories. If you think back in your life, the strongest members you have are based on when you're with other people that communal experience and in some ways it also helps us deal with grief.

So where did all this come from? Well, I had the fortune of going to one of my favorite activities in Nebraska, football game with my wife who hasn't been to a game in about nine years because we've been taking care of kids, and she's the best, and we took our two children for the first time. And we're there with 85,000 or so other people after Nebraska had lost in Ireland. Many of us getting tired of the of the losing process, but as I sat there and looked around the stadium memories and I hadn't been for a couple of years because of covid obviously and then with kids you're always busy on Saturdays, but I looked around the stadium and realized the value to me in this communal experience. We're all rooting for the same team by the way. Keep in mind, even if you're not a sports fan this is a team that hasn't done all that well recently and yet the Stadium's full. It's all that our community talks about. And as my father and I were chatting about the game we talked about how football isn't just about winning and losing, but it's a part of our fabric who we are as a culture, and that it's more about how we play the game than whether we win or lose.

Don't get me wrong. We want to win. I think a lot of us think we're a lot happier when we were winning, but it's connected to everything we do and so if we start thinking about communal experiences we start thinking about things like the football game, the basketball team, maybe it's your church and you're gathering every week. Maybe it's about gathering in the neighborhood and and sharing neighborhood experiences, it's about school. Part of the mental health challenge in our education system with young people right now is because we pulled them out for a long period of time. I'm not going to get into the politics of too long, too short, too many opinions... but what we know is that the social isolation had a very negative effect on children because that was the communal experience. I don't know if you experience or have seen this in your own kids. we have a nine-year-old, a five-year-old. A five-year-old should start in kindergarten, nine-year-olds in third grade, and they come home and bedtime's gotten, as we started school, a lot earlier because they are exhausted. Too much communal activity can be overwhelming, can be tiring.

Most people are somewhat surprised when I tell them I'm really at base an introvert. I need downtime. I need Randall time. And sometimes even though I do a lot of public speaking and obviously consultants about relationship with others, there are times when I've got to pull back because it's overwhelming because it's tiring.

The challenge in today's modern world is that there's another area of communal connection that we didn't deal with at least as little as 15 years ago, or certainly when I was a child. The internet has allowed for a different level or kind of communal connection. We think about chat rooms and Facebook, and these are places that potentially can become, my term for it, wormholes where if you don't have a strong communal life - family, friends, people in your church, people in your work, people at school, wherever that is you might end up with a group of people that may not have your best interests at heart. Now this isn't solely isolated to the internet. Communal activity and engagement is also in history, the story of some of our worst moments as human beings, from genocides, or we justified it, or tried to justify it in certain ways, to enslavement of other people because we thought we could justify it. Communally it was a value that somehow we thought was a good idea to, how we treat others, to kind of this idea of a group mentality that this is a really smart thing to do and turns out it's really stupid. For the most part, communal engagement or experiences are positive. But if led by or striving for the wrong connections can be very negative.

So what does this all have to do with philanthropy? You're probably asking, this is not a Randal philosophy podcast this is a nonprofit podcast. This idea of communal experience, I've been thinking about a lot over the last several days, is because of the way in which nonprofit work is changed. And I'll break it down into four areas, and this is the tactical things that we've got to think about and figure out how to deal with the office, our boards, our donors, and yourself.

So covid changed the way our offices are structured. It also changed the way we have communal experiences. For most nonprofit professionals, we went to an office. Very few people worked remotely. It just wasn't, didn't say it didn't happen, but it wasn't common or as common. Today we have a revolution of people wanting to work from home, work they they say and it probably is better work-life balance. It gives them more flexibility. All of these things, all of which I'm not disagreeing with. I mean the science says productivity is actually pretty good, but here's the question. Does that change the nature of our shared communal experiences with our staff members? People that we work with? Can you replicate that in a way online? Should you be doing hybrid so you can gather how do you create communal experiences?

Many offices went to social Friday and that you bring your own cup of coffee to your computer and we talk about what everybody's drinking in you know their particular coffee or whatever it is, just not about work but a communal gathering to try to replicate that. Now I'm old school. I like being in front of people. But I have found great value with clients in creating communal experiences together via Zoom. So it can be done but we can't isolate our offices. We have to find ways of embracing each other to get those strong values or outcomes that I mentioned earlier, things like similar belief system, common ground, common good, stability, a unifying force. If you have communal activity and gathering it pulls your office together.

Second is boards. It's totally anecdotal. I'm no scientist, but I've noticed as I do my consulting work and work with boards that boards are considerably less communal today than they were before. That the use of Zoom for board meetings has created a little more isolation than I like. My opinion only when it comes to our boards, think about what is the Hallmark of a board and its success, it's all about driving, moving, striving for the same direction within the mission parameters that the organization has. But there's some things that come out of communal experiences that I see boards retrenching on. I think when we have groups of people together like our boards and we're striving for a central goal that we are more willing if we're together, if we can look across the table, if we know that that person or those people who are in the board, who are with us are willing to go on this journey alongside of us they are we are more willing to take risk. Bigger plans, bigger opportunities, boy would that be nice in philanthropy that we, they're more willing to act. More and more board members I'm dealing with are unwilling, and it never was easy to make introductions to staff members, leaders in the community meaning other community leaders at the country club, The Yacht Club, the wine club, the church, wherever the social gathering points are of one's community. And more board members spend their social engagement, we need those introductions. They're more willing to do so if it's a group-wide effort. They're willing to go beyond what's thought of or can be restricted from individual thought processes, meaning the group can get further when together when they're moving in the same direction. Communal experience would tell me that that's why getting boards together on a regular basis is critically important. It's why I believe in what I call Mission Moments. I didn't make up the term, it's been used a million times before me. But what is it that we can have together as a collective emotion about the mission we're trying to serve and be able to articulate what that means, to not only the individual board member themselves but to the group? You'll get greater engagement with better communal experiences.

The fourth is donors. There's no question that there were some pretty amazing work done by fundraisers in the pandemic to make quick adjustments to maximize giving opportunities, particularly of those that have been long-standing, long-time donors. Those that stewarded well did well. My question is as as philanthropies needed more and more, particularly on some of our community's biggest challenges and needs, and every community has different ones. It could be homelessness, and and poverty, and food insecurity. It could be health care for another community. It could be education for another community. Whatever it is, my experience previously - previous to covid, previous to the pandemic - this is that bigger dreams happen and are accomplished when we have donors and community leaders in the same place at the same time, meaning that there's a greater community understanding of the value of the bigger dream. It doesn't mean gifts don't happen, but if we want philanthropy to be the game changer then we need bigger dreams and we need the resources from the community to help fulfill those dreams. And I think when we talk about communal experiences that gathering that it's more likely that there's a bigger dream and more likely that it gets completed when we have activities together.

By the way, if we take into the tactics why do we do giving societies? I just looked at my law school giving society because they had sent out kind of an update on here's what we're going to print because that's communal experience. When my class is given what group am I in? Who else is in that group? So there's that at the very tactical perspective. But I just think transformational becomes more possible when we have communal experiences when people are around, other people, and can see the passion and the vision that one has and to get on board with it to make the community a better place.

The last is about self. I'm deeply concerned with how many people I see in isolation based on their professional life working from home, and I'm starting to ask the question. I don't, I ask a little more simply but, are you having communal experiences? Who are the people that are part of your community? Are you all right with where you are? And again, I'm an introvert which surprises people. there are times I need to be pulled back. I need to pull back from my wife and kids, like I just need some quiet time. But what I know is that we all need a sense of community. By the way, that can be family, that can be kids, that could be a a coffee group, the church, and you know your, my dad counts money at the church every Tuesday at noon and he just looks forward to it... communal experience.

Think about when you think about yourself. When you think about your donors, your boards, or your office, how do you have communal experiences that move the mission forward? Because what we know from the science and history and we look back along, you know, centuries of human existence, it's the communal experiences that move society. And that's what we've got to figure out how to do more often, and do them for the right reasons not the wrong ones to make the world a better place for us all.

Don't forget, reach out to me it's podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com if you have a subject or a comment, and if you would like a little bit of extra Hallett Philanthropy and Randall Hallett, look at the blogs, 90 second reads right on the website www.hallettphilanthropy.com, and leave me a comment on on the podcast, YouTube, wherever you can download it. Look at it. Tell me what you think. What you're doing is important, it's bringing communal experiences together. And remember my all-time favorite saying, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened, and that what we know is that people who want to make things happen do so in a most the time in a communal experience for the group of people who are wondering what's happening for the organizations that are struggling the most for the things in our community that need it the most. And you're a part of that and that's the great thing about working in nonprofit, in the nonprofit world. I hope you enjoy it. don't forget, life is about individual activity but living is about communal moments, and I hope you find yours each and every day. Appreciate your time. We'll see you right back here on "Around with Randall", and don't forget make it a great day.