I think a bottleneck to this is often that having the explicit goal of trying to make the members of your EA group become friends can feel inorganic and artificial. The activities you suggest seem like a good way of doing this in a way that doesn’t feel forced, and I’ll probably be using some of these ideas for EA Ireland. Thanks for writing this wholesome post up!
Good point—an aspect of this that I didn’t expand on a lot is that it’s really important for organisers to do things that they enjoy doing and this helps it to not feel forced.
On the other hand, I have had conversations with our group about maximising time spent together as a way to build better friendships and people generally reacted to this idea better than I imagined! I think sharing your intentions to maximise friendship-building activities will feel robotic to some people but others may appreciate the thought and effort behind it.
I think a bottleneck to this is often that having the explicit goal of trying to make the members of your EA group become friends can feel inorganic and artificial. The activities you suggest seem like a good way of doing this in a way that doesn’t feel forced, and I’ll probably be using some of these ideas for EA Ireland. Thanks for writing this wholesome post up!
Good point—an aspect of this that I didn’t expand on a lot is that it’s really important for organisers to do things that they enjoy doing and this helps it to not feel forced.
On the other hand, I have had conversations with our group about maximising time spent together as a way to build better friendships and people generally reacted to this idea better than I imagined! I think sharing your intentions to maximise friendship-building activities will feel robotic to some people but others may appreciate the thought and effort behind it.