Happy 2026, I’m back after taking January off! This fieldnote will appeal most to those of you convening community spaces — it’s a bit longer than usual, bear with me!

Best practices tell us, “don’t go into a meeting or community gathering without an agenda.” But what if we shift that best practice on its head?

Let’s flashback to summer 2025. Over 10 months, I had partnered with other changemakers to convene experimental community gatherings around resistance, changemaking, and hope.

The goal was to shake us out of the “capitalist” ways of gathering, which focused more on extracting value from others rather than building true relationships.

As I reflected back, I noticed some patterns:

With one of my community co-stewards, we realized that “getting things done” with little breathing room (and heavy upfront planning) was not the vision we had for these sorts of gatherings.

We hypothesized that structure was the problem.

But what’s a big online gathering or workshop without an agenda and structure?What do you mean, no exercises, no division of time, no focused discussion?

You may be thinking: “That’s just chaos.” Or perhaps, “What a bad use of time!” (because no planning usually means poor outcomes, right?).

But we thought to ourselves, what would happen if we were to strip it all away? What would emerge if we simply let the energy and connections in the space guide us forward?

So we tried it out a few times. As co-conveners, we led the way through thoughtful prompts and modeling how to show up in the space: active listening and presence.

While it hasn’t always gone smoothly (those are stories for other fieldnotes!), one pattern has been consistent: people started showing up and relating to each other as people.

We all shared stories about our lives. Vented about what’s gotten in the way of living our values. Went off on tangents. Shared things we were working on.

And people started coming back to the space each month.

Under this open format, we realized we were planting more meaningful seeds of community that weren’t rooted in extraction (“what can I get from this?”) but in connection (“how can I meaningfully relate to you?”). Even if that meant that fewer people showed up.

I believe these seeds can create fertile ground for other community work (where structure will be needed).

The agenda and structure you choose for your gatherings, meetings and workshops should be in service of your intentions.

If you want to seed open-ended creative exploration, relationship building, or meaningful dialogues, then a rigid, line-by-line agenda may actually get in the way of that.

Because sometimes what happens spontaneously in real-time is much richer than what was planned on paper. Letting go of (some) structure opens up the space to be shaped by those who are present.

But little structure or no agenda doesn’t mean unprepared or lacking care. You still need active, care-led attunement with those present, comfort with improvisation, and facilitation methods in your back pocket to turn to in a pinch. (If those are skills you’d want to build in the future, let me know and I may develop a workshop series around it!)

The next time you’re planning a gathering, consider playing around with its design, even in small, incremental ways:

Upcoming events
On Thursday, February 19th, the two communities I steward — Design Changemakers & Inclusive Design Jam — will take part in a special cross-community gathering (5 communities total). Our theme is Radical Reimaginations of the Future (and yes, it will be structured!).

And we’ll be doing our next Unwind gathering (cozy and agenda-less!) on February 25th in Design Changemakers. Hope to see you there.