A bit in dispair for new avenues to reach more people I took the initiative (at my own expense) to create a Meetup group. My reasoning is that this is a place that attracts people who are looking for community and for events, quite often expats.
What I did, is I created a “Cohousing in Brussels” group. I guess we could have our own “Cohousing The Reef” group, but my intuition is that it makes more sense to share the group with other cohousings. This way the group somehow becomes a complement to Habitat & Participation, except that this reaches an audience that is not necessarily thinking of cohousing as their first choice (and also the event promotion is much more intuitive).
Within that group - which got 7 members overnight! - I have now created an event for The Reef. I asked my friend ChatGPT to draft a text that explains the virtues of cohousing to a layman. I’m not 100% satisfied with the text, so if anybody hears a calling, all feedback is welcome.
For the way forward, there are two options: either this works, either it doesn’t. If it does work, then I will bring in an unforeseen expense. We can then also discuss whether we want to share the Meetup group with other cohousings like e.g. Volta. I personally think that we are different enough from each other to not be competitors, so I think it can be in the interest of pretty much everybody who wants to start a cohousing in Brussels to have a Meetup group where they can advertise their events. But this we can discuss later. Let’s first see whether this works.
I left the login credentials on Nextcloud for anybody who would like to have a look. If anybody has a Meetup account, please don’t hesitate to put yourself on “going”.
Update: 20 people have clicked on “attend” for the presentation on 27 May (online). The other presentations (in person), both ours and in person, get less response, even though we occassionally see people actually register for one of the presentations.
I just gave you the maximum admin rights, called “co-organiser”. Can you please have a look what the differences are?
If you want to login as The Reef (group owner), you will find the login details on Nextcloud > Team IT > Login credentials.
On another topic: Sabrine Samenhuizen asked for access to the account, so that she can put the events from the summer programme in our group. That’s really good news. I’m thinking, if it would turn out that we do need a paid account, that they may be interested to take over the entire account by the end of the year, once the group has become big enough?
If our goal is simply to create events ( info session in this case ) and insert the registration form in the description, based on my experience, I would agree to cancel.