The First Summit

The Birth of an Idea

The idea for the first Cohesion Summit came to us two weeks before the first event. We realized that many people we knew were working on extremely similar projects, but were not aware of each other's visions and, more specifically, duplicating efforts trying to recreate the same structures when they could work together.

This inspired us to start bringing the "people who bring people together" together. We started thinking about superconnectors (connecting nodes between people: for example, community builders and event organizers) as our first category of people who did similar work, then gradually expanded our awareness to many different types of endeavors. Part of our reasoning for starting the Cohesion Summit was also downstream of having attended Chris D's superconnecting course at Weave, which is where we had energizing conversations about bringing people together. In a way, the Cohesion Summit feels like our Final Task that we graduated the course with (thank you, Chris!).

The Sprint to Launch

We promptly started working on advertising. We got stickers and flyers printed the week-end before the event, designed by Erin, and started sharing them little by little. We got 50 stickers for $44.07 and 50 flyers for $55.37, so in total these cost us $99.44. In hindsight, the stickers were definitely worth the effort (fun memorabilia, potential of organic advertising), but the flyers ended up being a bit wasteful. We do not intend to run the flyer printing again, but we are open to more stickers in the future if the collective would like some (and we still have some of the old ones!).

We booked the CSI Spadina for three hours, for $1149.78, around a week before the event. We had a broad idea of what we wanted to do (put people in the same room, have them share ideas, have them find common ground), but we wanted the itinerary of the summit to be a collaborative process as well. This led us, with the advice of Uwe, to dream up a co-creation pre-summit session, where we would get as many people as possible giving us feedback on how best to facilitate this event.

Last-Minute Pivots

Our co-creation pre-summit was initially supposed to be on the Tuesday before the event, at Civic Tech. Unfortunately, right before we were supposed to get to the City Hall, Erin had a bike accident (hence the cast boot in the pictures!), so both of us went to the ER. The pre-summit got moved to our friend Paul's meetup on the very next day. We had incredible contributions from the people attending the meetup, and we finalized the itinerary two days before the event. Separate from that meetup, and throughout the process, we also got incredible advice from our friend Jordan about how to run this event. His experience and help in designing our deliverables was so important and so valuable.

Having the itinerary finalized so late before the event definitely put a dent in our ability to spread the word. A few acquaintances mentioned not feeling excited for the event before they knew what would happen there, which made complete sense to us. We are incredibly grateful to the people who came, and we garnered 30 attendees! The total revenue from the ticket sales, including donation tier tickets, was $380. We did not break even, but honestly? This event feels like an investment, and we are happy to have invested in it.

The Day Of

We got help from so many friends who volunteered to help run the event on the day of: Daniel, Andrew, but also help from the CSI themselves, who not only let us use their mailing list for advertising, but also kindly offered an AV volunteer. We brought snacks: chips and dip and veggie dips for roughly $90.

People were excited and engaged, and although teams at first struggled to form, the end pitches - about an ecosystem map, about personal well-being, and about religion as a form of cognitive security - were very qualitative and demonstrated incredible… cohesion! And forward-thinking! Our attendees are awesome. Thank you so much guys, genuinely.

What's Next

We considered having an afterparty at a bar (inspired by the Civic Tech format, who continues to inspire us). We wanted to send out a feedback form as soon as possible, but we kept delaying when the next summit would happen due to struggling to find a venue; eventually, we convened on asking people for feedback in-person, and we did get incredible feedback!

The second summit was intended to be two weeks afterwards, then three, and finally we settled on October 9th. But that's a story for the next article… Thanks for reading ♥