AlannaBurke
commented
7 years ago From our slack convo:
When i was a chapter leader of Girl Develop It San Diego, which covered a HUGE area - not just the city but the county - we found that having events all over the county made a huge difference. to do this, we increased our leadership team and got a bunch of different people managing and organizing events at different places. That meant that sometimes the attendance at different events didn’t overlap at all - but it felt good that our org was serving such a big group. and when we did this with our smaller, casual events, people would come from much farther away to our classes (which we also tried to spread out but that was much harder)
I’d suggest looking at your whole metro area and getting a leadership team together, and organizing events throughout the area.
We coordinated the meetings, i don’t think we ever had enough meetings that there were conflicts, but if the organizer/location schedules had required there to be conflicts, i think we would have just rolled with it. keep in mind, some of our events were basically hours away from each other, which won’t be the case everywhere.
Our leadership team kept each other updated and we had a calendar for everything, a slack, a newsletter, etc
But when we reached out for people who wanted to help organize events locally, it made such a difference - especially when those people realized if they organized events near them, they didn’t have to drive all the way into the city or wherever.
And we were able to use all sorts of contacts - restaurants, bars, people’s work, we started a book club at a library because someone had a contact there. It was awesome!
Folks consistently ask about how to improve POC attendance at their meetups. Worth working on resources to help since it comes up consistently.
Some possibilities from @rubyji "reaching out to local Girl Develop It & Women Who Code groups, I think there is at least one network for PoC in tech, talk to folks at the local HBCU. Even if they aren’t Drupallers, they might have interesting topics they can present about."