Frodo: I am going alone.
Samwise: Of course you are, and I am coming with you.
People Need People Online opens spaces for intimacy-in-isolation, spaces of humility and integrity, generative and generous spaces of love and caring. They’re alive, warm, and human.
During this time of crisis, we all need to be apart in ways we have never been before. We also need to be together in ways we have never been before. Isolation, fragmentation, fracture of existing systems, loss of employment are coupled with sudden psychological, emotional and intellectual rearrangements of life in this moment. The combining of these changes is creating a new kind of need to be met.
As we contract into our homes, we also need to expand our hearts and ways of connecting.
Without knowing how. Just learning together.
People Need People Online is…
A place for exchange & healing
An online space for people in their communities encountering an entirely new way of getting through their days to deal with basic needs as well as meeting the more ancient survival need of warm human connection.
A place for interdependence
A meeting of many contexts of life, a space where the complexity of how we come together meets the complexity inside each of us. Founded on the rigorous principles of the Warm Data Lab process to hold the complexity of systems change with vitality and warmth. The structure of the online spaces and the interaction of the participants generates recognition that the immediate physical and financial needs of the community are interdependent with needs for communication, learning, and figuring out how to get through the unknowns of this moment and explore a new space opening up of unprecedented possibility.
A digital campfire
A place for experimentation with new and existing technologies to breathe warmth into otherwise cold and two dimensional digital spaces.
A place for strengthening ties
An activation of generosity and integrity towards the interdependency of collective life. When the structures are melting, it is this connective tissue that is the fiber of what holds together community
Who is People Need People Online for?
People Need People Online is for people in communities that have been isolated - this group should be cross-generational, multi-contextual, tending to the community's interactions. People need each other. Participants are invited from within the community across age, race, religion, and wealth demographics.
The process will require a certified Warm Data Lab Host to hold the integrity and vitality of the process to start with. This is to ensure that the online experience is able to offer the same warmth and generosity of the in-person Warm Data Lab*, during this extended period of isolation. There are currently 30 certified Warm Data Lab hosts across several communities in Pittsburgh and over 300 hosts in the world.
Why it matters.
There are some things that feel impossible to shift in this crazy world, but recent events are demonstrating the fluidity of patterns and structures that we previously considered rigid. Now we see a vast opening of possibility of things to be done to open a new future where people help people — right now, today, without committees or policies or intermediaries.
The People Need People Online space opens up for creativity, new forms of care, kindness, solidarity, warmth, spontaneity, and role redefinition. The question arises, “who can we be in this time of unprecedented change?”
Many are wondering who is actually there for them. Many now ask, “how can I be of service?”
Now is the time to allow for the connective tissue of our societies to form in new ways. New relational patterns beget new structures from the richness of new shared connections.
People Need People Online supports people to lean into each other in times of need, to learn together, and grow more resilient together.
