Supercharging the grassroots political action in our communities
Nicole àBeckett, co-founder of SameSide, empowers hosts to infuse their existing events with purposeful and participatory action.
This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack, and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
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“You don’t have to be a celebrity or a mega influencer to take action and host an event. A hundred people or a thousand people don’t have to attend. It can be five people. That impact is still impact. ” — Nicole àBeckett
Just after the 2016 U.S. election, many people were saying, “I want to do more to get involved but I don’t know how.” Nicole àBeckett and her brother, David, knew there had to be a better way to bring people together for action on issues that matter.
They started SameSide with a simple idea: to incorporate civic engagement within existing communities. Nicole worked with a neighbor named Phil to host the first event in March of 2017.
Phil had a large network of friends and rallied them just after the Women’s March to campaign for Sarah Hernandez, a candidate for Senate in California. Together with SameSide, he paired phone banking with a brewery tour. While phone banking was intimidating to some, the brewery tour with friends nudged fifteen of Phil’s buds across the threshold to activism.
Through the SameSide platform, this kind of accessible activism model reaches scale. SameSide offers hosts the tools to learn and take action on issues. A host’s job isn’t to be an expert; it’s to convene people around something they care about. The Standard Hotel is hosting pool parties advocating for gun safety. A woman celebrating her birthday wove in efforts to support ending the rape kit backlog in California.
We talked with Nicole about how she has empowered hosts with tools to gather folks around what they care about to take action.
You can listen to the full episode here:
In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we share a framework to spark, stoke, and scale community. Nicole offers insights into the third step: passing the torch.
Creating more leaders.
The role of a SameSide host is to be the “convener.” A host does not need to be an expert in a topic or issue, they just have to communicate that they care about it. Genuine passion attracts passionate people.
SameSide has found that at each event, two new hosts are generated because “people see somebody like them hosting or doing something that brings people together and they think, ‘Oh, I can do this with my book club’” or whatever community they are part of.
Supercharging leaders.
In service of the community, SameSides creates toolkits for groups gathering around different issues. Nicole’s team distills information and resources from frontline organizations who have had their boots on the ground for years doing civic work.
“One of the biggest barriers to our hosts actually doing something was that they didn’t feel that they could be a subject matter expert,” Nicole found. Toolkits are sent out to not only the leaders but each event attendee. It empowers the group to learn with one another and takes the burden off the host to be the expert so they can focus on being the convener.
Dialing up the participation
For many community leaders we work with, one of the greatest fears is: will anyone show up to my event? SameSide assures them that smaller events often leave room for intimate conversations to dive deep into issues of substance that affect people’s everyday lives. There’s real emotional power in that.” The emotional power carries into what SameSide set out to do: take action.
People often have a deep experience at events that moves them to take action in some form — sharing a resource, signing a petition, and communicating their personal experiences.
If you want to find Nicole online and learn about SameSide, head over to their website.
Thank you, Marjorie Anderson, “Get Together” correspondent, for bringing Nicole’s story to us.
This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.
To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”
We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.
