I do not mean this as a rhetorical question: I mean it literally. Tell us what’s stopping you! I don’t want to invalidate you, but the opposite. I’m sure people here would love to help if it’s possible. Post away!
Personally, I think Covid and the general amount of work everyone does are the two biggest obstacles to community building. Not just for me, but everybody I know. It’s nearly impossible to build a community when nobody has the energy to even play a video game together, and actually meeting up in person can literally kill you. There are definitely solutions, but we need to realize them as problems first to find them. If you have suggestions, please share them! Same goes for the issues everyone else shares (if they’re ok with help, of course).
I live in a small-ish university town with a max of 2 degrees of separation for any random person. I put my unfortunately distinctive name and face on an attempt to start a DSA chapter here a little over 6 years ago, then burned out because I had undiagnosed autism and ADHD and couldn’t get a good grasp on group dynamics.
There’s a lot that went wrong, and it contributed to a social life spiral - I tried to go back to hanging out with my old townie friends, people who weren’t even DSA-level leftists, and it was hard to like them anymore or have much compassion for them, because I know how they feel about the societal stuff. They don’t give much of a fuck about anyone who isn’t them.
Then COVID happened, and seeing that even that didn’t inspire any extra care in any of them - they were having parties as soon as it wasn’t illegal to do so, and I bet they were probably doing them before and just not posting about it. My husband and I both have immunocompromised parents with lung issues, and seeing how little of a fuck our “friends” gave about us or our parents was a disappointing shock. We got them to Skype us once the entire time. We tried to move past it once we got vaccinated, but the shine was off. We are not friends with any of those people anymore.
I found a local Food Not Bombs chapter in autumn '22, but then my mom got super sick, so I left because I didn’t have time to do anything with them anymore. I was having a hard time feeling like I fit in, too, and trying to cram in organizing with people I suspect don’t like me wasn’t a high priority when I thought my mom was dying.
So now I’ve got no friends, a bad reputation with the local leftists, and idk where to go from here. Doing the DSA thing introduced me to another local chapter of a big org - ISO maybe? they split off the national org a while back - and while one of them definitely hated me, there were a couple that seemed to actually kinda like me, and I’ve thought about reaching out to them to see if they’re doing anything I could help with.
I’m in a weird place though personally, struggling with content warning feelings while coming to terms with AuDHD I didn’t know about for 40 years, and I definitely need a therapist before I put myself out there that much again. I made an Open Path account a couple weeks ago and reached out to a therapist but haven’t heard back yet. I didn’t want to pester hard though, because it’s the holidays and not an emergency.
So yeah, that’s where I am, feel free to make suggestions if you have them or ask questions if it will help inform your suggestions or satisfy your curiosity.