Zoom This Week: On Doing Community In Hard Times

The image here is a goofy compilation of a laptop on a desk with a notebook, phone, a cup of something, and animal paws on the laptop as if it’s operating the keys. The laptop screen says “Zoo Conf” and includes photos arranged in a grid like a Zoom, but with animal photos instead. Image by Brian Cragun from Pixabay.

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Hi! It’s Monday, it’s nearly the end of September, and all kinds of craziness and hard stuff continues to happen here up in these United States. Looks like it’s likely to keep escalating this week. That’s just where we’re at.

Fierce Community did a post on Friday called Doing Community As Turmoil, Tension, & Volatility Escalate. This post here is a reminder of Zooms happening tonight and Wednesday night about exactly that: doing community in hard times. Join us —

• Monday, 9/29, earlier evening Zoom (done)

• Wednesday, 10/1, later evening Zoom

This organization promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption.

A key feature there is “civic engagement.”

One way we can do that is by gathering together to talk about it and other stuff, in community, on a Zoom.

Anyway, join us if you’re interested and able. Invite family. Bring friends. We’d love to get more engagement and involvement from our audience here. We’re growing work together to help navigate this increasingly challenging time.

Hope to see you. If that doesn’t work, take care where you are.

Zooms and other Fierce Community efforts are made possible by people who donate to this work through ActBlue, through Patreon, and through paid Substack subscriptions.

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Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. It’s through-finding by countering fear. Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive. She has over 25 years experience in resilience-building, civic engagement, coalition-building, critical infrastructure, systems thinking, big disasters, catastrophes, wildland fire, emergency management, incident management, land management, park rangering, homeland security, continuity of operations (COOP), continuity of government (COG), technology innovation, public communication, and disaster information sharing.