Weekly Seeds | September 23, 2023 | The OG Community
Published by Noa Elan on
Noa’s top of mind
Tis the season (for Jewish people) of back-to-back holidays: Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, all taking place this month. And despite religion congregations being the OG communities of the world, I still feel intense resistance when I think about walking into a temple or engaging in activities that feel "religious". Nothing like a good edge to lean into.
I’m continually inspired by how Trixie Lamonte weaves their Jewish identity into their personal, and professional lives. If you want to catch Trixie in one of these magical moments, they are putting on a Yom KINKpur performance at Folsom Street Fair (San Francisco) this Sunday, Sept 24, at 4:30pm, on the Twisted Window stage (at 11th and Folsom). “Yom KINKpur is a unique rope bondage piece that navigates the Yom Kippur theme's of forgiveness, who shall live, who shall die, surrender, Tzedakah, prayer, and repentance.” You can also catch Trixie teaching role play and dirty talk at Bloom next week.
One way that I’m shifting my thinking about communities:
This is an insight I picked from a dear human on the Mission Control leadership team. Their perspective opened my eyes to an unconscious framing I have regarding the “Bloom member community” and “Bloom organizer community”. I realized that I think of the community as a single organism (i.e “I’m inviting the community to our new free consent workshops”), but in reality, there is no “community”, the community is a group of individual people, making individual decisions. This is such a good reminder as I continue to send these mass emails to a bunch of individual humans.
Data! Data! Data!
Next week we’re celebrating a big milestone on the events side. Look out for comms in next few weeks with interesting events stats, organizer spotlights, and more.
#Trending:
Lyft announced Women+ Connect, a match-setting in which women and nonbinary drivers and riders match with each other. I’m happy that Lyft is addressing the platform’s safety issues, which hold women drivers back from making equal pay and exposes drivers and riders to physical harm. And the harsh reality is that women and nonbinary people likely pay a high price for this safety benefit, in the form of lower driver earnings and longer pick-up wait time.
Community spotlight:
For bisexual awareness week, I am excited to introduce you to Marisa Musso (she/they), who is leading Bloom’s bisexual speed-dating / speed-friending events in the Bay. Marisa is a Therapist, Life Coach and bisexual activist with a passion for helping people connect and live more authentically. I have learned so much from the few calls I had with them since joining Bloom, including how to be an ally to the hard of hearing population (including all the ways in-person speed dating events are challenging). I recommend checking out Marisa’s digital bookshelf.
Growing Bloom
We’ve done a quick refresh to our post-event Budding screen, and matched the design with the event-RSVP list design. This should hopefully make your experience on the app more intuitive and delightful. You can now Bud with one tap and continue to flirt and pass on profiles. Also, we are thankful for anyone who takes the time to rate events, our organizers and our team looks at this information ALL THE TIME.
