Dear MIX Membership:
It has been, without a doubt, an incredible summer.
When I agreed to take over ManyLoves late in 2022, I did so full of anxiety and concern. I knew that Nashville needed an engaging and active ENM/CNM community – but was I really the one that needed to organize that community? Did I have what it would take? Would I find the right people to help me? And – most importantly – would anyone care enough to show up?
Thankfully, appears that my faith in the Nashville ENM/CNM community was well placed. Not only have we been able to organize ourselves into a functional group with leadership and multiple online community spaces in the three months since we relaunched ManyLoves as MIX Nashville, we’ve held seven events this summer, with great attendance at all of them! The volunteers who have helped with planning and the execution of those events have been fantastic to work with, as well. You, our members, have responded to our surveys and given us feedback after events, helping us bring the activities and learning opportunities you, the community, wanted to see. I feel confident that things are currently on the right track to continue our core mission: to be a community-lead organization where leadership works to make the community’s wants into a reality.
This has been an amazing experience for me, and I hope to continue to lead this group for a little bit longer, at least – but that’s not a decision I will make, nor is it a decision I should make. Like activities and events, the decision of who leads the group is one that ultimately must be answered by the members. As such, I believe that we, as a community, need to hold elections to make sure that my leadership (or, honestly, any individual’s leadership who may succeed me in the future) is truly supported by, at minimum, a majority of our membership.
A self-appointed leader makes sense in a handful of situations; the creation and/or reinvention of a community is, I believe, one of those acceptable situations. Given that we’re no longer in the creation/reinvention portion of MIX Nashville’s lifespan, I feel my justification for continuing to lead despite not being elected your leader is no longer acceptable. I have no current mandate to lead – nobody has officially said “Harvey, we’d like for you to be the Director of MIX Nashville.” Sure, I’ve had some very nice compliments and words of appreciation from many of you in our community when we’ve met, but that’s not really an acceptable way to determine a leader, is it? 🙂
Further complicating this lack of a mandate, we haven’t, as a community, determined who actually gets to vote in this initial election for Director of the group. Furthermore, we don’t even really have any consensus whether my position of Director is even something our community agrees is even a position that should exist! I, with the support of the Leadership Group (our volunteers who help make our events happen), have proposed a set of goals, intentions and principles we want to be a part of MIX Nashville going forward. We published these on our website at our relaunch (under the “Mission” link at the top of every page, including the very page you’re reading this on). We’ve asked what you’ve thought of them in our past surveys, and we’ve done everything we know how to make sure those principles, goals and intentions are present in every event we’ve thrown (and currently plan to throw) so far.
But these are our thoughts, not your thoughts. Without the review, verification and assent to these plans, we’re not following our most important principle: that MIX Nashville is, at all times, a member-lead organization. It is critical to both our success as leaders, and MIX Nashville as a community, that everything we do be based in the desires of our members.
Here are the questions that we, the Leadership Group, believe the MIX Nashville community must answer before we can continue to successfully grow in the long-term future:
- What are the principles of MIX Nashville? What do we, as a community, stand for? Why do we all bother to get together to support one another and do the work to keep the lights on and the events happening?
- What standards, if any, does the community want each member to meet before someone is allowed to have a voice in choosing leaders and approving policies (e.g. voting)?
- How does the community want to choose its leaders, how often do they want to choose those leaders, and what specific standards should a member of our community have before they’re able to be considered for a leadership position?
- What authorities and decision-making capacities do our members want any chosen leadership to have when it comes to our community?
I have spoken about these questions in the past – it was a significant portion of our last membership survey we put out in June. One response in that survey made me pause and really think about our current Leadership’s desire for organization; the response in question is as follows:
“Folks, you are making this waaayyy too complicated for a group that doesn’t even really exist yet, and will likely only ever have a few dozen consistent members. You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this, which is great, but it seems very head in the clouds and idealized.”
This response was, I believe, made genuinely and in good-faith. At the time, we didn’t know that we’d have 30+ people showing up to many of our FULLMIX events. We didn’t know what many of our events would look like, much less how many people would be attending them. We didn’t know we’d have 50% more people on our mailing list in September than we started with in June. We didn’t know if anyone would care about trying to create MIX Nashville into what we’ve made it so far. So, why all the concern about the future and structure of the group? Why all the formality?
It was, and is, a reasonable question that bears answering.
There is a famous Greek proverb that says “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” As someone who has previously participated in less formalized ENM/CNM communities, I experienced first-hand what happens when a group doesn’t make plans for its future from the outset. I know all too well what can result from a lack of foresight and planning about how to make a community stand the test of time. Without making organization a tenant of our community, the good work, resources, and (most importantly) time invested by our volunteers ultimately would be for nothing in as little as five years, if not sooner.
Communities without structure eventually collapse under their own weight. This is not just my opinion, but a long-established behavior of human communities; at some point, an informal grouping of likeminded people must become either more organized or wither and die from a lack of new members. While our current members are extremely important, we know our membership will change over time. People’s personal lives will change and require them to leave, either temporarily or even for good. People will also arrive at our community, and without any guidance explaining what we stand for, how we operate, and how we expect our members to integrate with us, will likely become frustrated and move on.
I don’t want to build something just for me and the people around me right now – I want help make something that will help Nashville’s ENM/CNM community both now and far into the future. I want to help MIX become something that ENM/CNM communities in other locations look to for guidance (both what to do, and even what not to do) when organizing their own member-lead communities. I want to help build a group that normalizes our relationships and helps educate our larger communities, promoting acceptance and reducing prejudice against us. I want to be an organization that helps support subgroups of marginalized communities represented in our midst to achieve their goals of greater acceptance and integration into our city and our world. I want to plant a tree with my friends and peers that will provide shade for years (decades, even) that none of us now will fully enjoy – and I think you, our members, do too.
In the coming months, its the intention of our Leadership Group to bring more of you, our members, into these conversations about where MIX Nashville is headed, why we’re headed there, and what we, as a community, may need to accomplish to ensure that we continue to exist long beyond the relatively short time we, as leaders, will help guide this group. We’ll be conducting another survey before the end of the year to make sure we’re continuing to offer events and programming our members want us to provide, and we’ll start having discussions – both in-person and virtual – about what goes into making our community work, and how a member can join us in Leadership to help make the wants and desires of our community into real events and programs that we all can enjoy. Be on the lookout for announcements about these new “leadership discussions” in the next few weeks – in addition to new and exciting events we can’t wait to tell you about!
Thank you for reading this far – I want to thank each and every one of you who’s shown up to a MIX event, given us feedback, and want to see MIX Nashville become a vibrant and diverse community which you enjoy and are proud to be a part of. I look forward to seeing where this process takes us next, and I can’t wait to have you along for the journey. 🙂
Sincerely,
Harvey Lapin, Interim Director
