Why activity isn’t the same thing as impact—and why belonging begins where responsibility starts.

Belonging doesn’t come from being visible.

It comes from knowing that if you weren’t there, something real would be missing.

In this solo episode, Tonya Kubo reflects on a moment from her conversation with Jeff Yoshimi that wouldn’t let her go: people stay engaged when their effort actually changes something.

From that insight, Tonya unpacks a distinction many communities get wrong—the difference between participation and contribution. Liking posts, showing up to meetings, and staying active can create the appearance of belonging without ever creating real agency. And when communities confuse visibility for value, people drift—not because they don’t care, but because nothing they do seems to matter.

This episode explores why participation is safe and scalable, why contribution is risky and uneven, and why belonging forms not through sameness, but through shared responsibility. Tonya also speaks directly to community builders and leaders, examining what it ethically demands to steward spaces—especially when you’re managing communities you’re not personally part of.

If you’ve ever felt invisible in a crowded room, burned out in a highly “engaged” space, or frustrated that your efforts never seem to change the outcome, this episode names what’s really happening—and why it’s not a personal failure.

You’ll hear how:

1. Participation measures presence, but contribution changes systems
2. Visibility can be mistaken for value—and why that erodes belonging
3. People disengage when effort has no consequence
4. Belonging forms through trust, not inclusion alone
5. Uneven impact makes contribution emotionally risky
6. Communities fail when they protect comfort instead of meaning
7. Ethical community stewardship centers member agency over control
8. Belonging doesn’t require sameness—it requires responsibility

Timestamp Highlights

1. 0:00 – 4:30 Why engagement doesn’t equal belonging
2. 4:31 – 9:10 The insight from gaming that reframed everything
3. 9:11 – 14:45 Participation vs. contribution—and why we confuse them
4. 14:46 – 19:30 Why people drift when nothing they do matters
5. 19:31 – 25:20 The emotional risk of uneven impact
6. 25:21 – 31:40 Designing communities where effort has consequence
7. 31:41 – 38:10 Stewardship, power, and managing communities you’re not part of
8. 38:11 – 43:50 Protecting pathways for agency instead of comfort
9. 43:51 – 48:30 Why belonging is responsibility—not sameness

Resources & Mentions

1. Episode 16 - Gaming Cancer: Belonging Beyond the Boundaries with Jeff Yoshimi
2. Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery by Jeff Yoshimi
3. University of California, Merced

Meet Your Host

Tonya Kubo is a community strategist, marketing consultant, and rebel with a cause: helping people find the place where they truly belong. For nearly two decades, she’s built online spaces that feel less like comment sections and more like chosen family. She’s the fixer you call when your Facebook group has gone straight-up Lord of the Flies and the bouncer at the door of internet nonsense. As the host of Find Your Freaks, Tonya brings together unconventional thinkers and bridge-builders who know “normal” was never the point. Her favorite spaces? The ones where the freak flags fly high.

Support the Show

If Find Your Freaks matters to you, help us keep it ad-free by buying us a coffee (or two!). Every dollar goes to production so more weirdos can find their people.

You can purchase Find Your Freaks merchandise online through Abilities and Attitudes.

Let’s Stay Freaky

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What’s Next

Tonya talks with Gwen Bortner, a business strategist and longtime collaborator, about creating connection outside the usual community models. No platforms, no funnels—just small, intentional relationships and what it looks like to build belonging off the grid.

Belonging doesn't require sameness, it requires responsibility. The problem when you treat visibility as value is that a community can be very, very active. There can be multiple posts a day, multiple comments a day, multiple reactions a day, right? There can be all this activity without actually making anybody feel like they're any better today than they were yesterday.

I can do my best, you can do your best, I can work my hardest, you can work your hardest, and one of us is still going to walk away not making as much of an impact as the other. So, you know, belonging doesn't come from being noticed, it comes from knowing that if you weren't there, something real would be missing. We're wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in.

I'm Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras, because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.

There's a moment in my interview with Jeff Yoshimi that I keep coming back to. It's not about cancer. It's not about gaming.

It's not even about the science. Although, trust me, that episode, plenty of science in there. But what keeps bubbling up for me is actually a little bit more uncomfortable.

And I would say that instead of like boiling like front of my brain, it's really much more quiet, like simmering kind of in the background of my head. But I keep chewing on it. In fact, it's taken me quite some time to be able to process it well enough to even sit down here and talk to you about it on the mic.

So in my episode with Jeff, you know, Jeff is a researcher, and he is a researcher whose wife battled cancer not too long ago. And so episode 16 is really about how her battle with cancer merged his professional, academic, and personal interests. And so in our episode, Jeff talks a lot about why games work, right? He had written a book called Gaming Cancer, specific to, you know, how video games and video gamers could actually be the next people to find a highly effective treatment or cure to cancers.

And so he talks about why games work. And a lot of the conversation is why people will spend hours solving impossibly complex problems inside a game, and yet completely ignore the problems that matter deeply in the real world, right? They're like so focused in this gaming world, and they tune out everything else around them. And what he says, and it's almost in passing, is that people stay engaged when their effort actually changes something.

And that has been keeping me up at night. Because I talk a lot about belonging on the show. I talk a lot about belonging professionally.

I talk a lot about belonging personally. I talk about inclusion. I talk about engagement and participation and showing up.

I talk so much about that with our guests. Our guests talk about, you know, what they're doing on that front. They talk about how they've seen, you know, belonging and participation change and show up over the years.

But very rarely do we answer the really hard question of does anything you do here actually matter? Especially for those of us who spend a lot of our time in online communities. That's a really hard question, right? Does anything you do here actually matter? That question oftentimes never gets asked while we're busy asking questions like, oh, you know, are you welcome? Do you feel welcome here? What makes you feel welcome here? Are you feeling seen? A lot of times we're, especially in the online space, we can get a little bit preoccupied with who likes our posts in an online community. You know, how many likes our posts get? But the deeper question that I want to talk about today is, does your presence change the system in any meaningful way? And for the basis of this conversation, I mean, we can talk about your presence in any space, in any system that comes to mind.

Because sort of what I want to put on the table right now and what I love about podcasts, is we can talk about right now. That's a snapshot in time. And we can all feel differently today than we did a year ago.

And we can feel differently right now than we will a year from now. But what I want to put on the table is my belief that belonging doesn't scale when people are invited to participate. Belonging scales when people are invited to matter.

When people feel like their presence and contributions make a difference, make an impact, can change things for the better, whether that's in a Facebook group, an online membership, or, you know, an in-person community, social club, activist organization. When they feel like they can make a difference and what they are doing actually makes an impact on the outcome, that, that's when they feel like they truly belong. That's where belonging comes into play.

And so today I want to unpack this in two parts for this episode. The first part is applicable. Like if you are interested in the title, Find Your Freaks, of this show, the first part's definitely going to apply to you.

We're going to talk about what it really means and what it costs when communities confuse participation with contribution. Second part. The second part's a little bit more, I'll say, insider speak for those of us who are professional community managers, right? So the second part of this episode, I want to talk about what that distinction, the distinction between participation and contribution, what that distinction demands of the people who are paid to design and steward communities, especially those who are not part of the groups that they've been hired to serve.

Because I've been in that position myself, and it's delicate. And there's a lot of differing opinions on whether you should even do that or not, right? So let's start with the first half though, right? The divide between participation versus contribution. So in many communities, there's some mistake, and we'll just say, you know, many communities in the general terms.

What we can't necessarily track, at least not in a numerical sense, we can't track the impact that participation has. Okay, we can't draw a line directly to that heart you left affecting change, whether that's changing people's minds, changing people's behavior, or even changing the fabric of the community. And what ends up happening because those engagement metrics, right, the likes, the comments, the shares, that sort of stuff in a community, because those can be tracked, we end up treating visibility as value, right? Because the more engagement a post gets on any platform, the more visible it is to other members.

So this is true if you run an off-social media community in Circle, Mighty Networks, what are the latest? Heartbeat School, right? The more people who react and comment, the more that post gets surfaced into other members' notifications. That's just how it works. A little bit different on social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, right, that also have an algorithm that feeds who sees what.

But we know across the board, the more engagement, the more comments, likes, and shares a post gets, the more people see it. And the problem when you treat visibility as value is that a community can be very, very active. There can be posts, multiple posts a day, multiple comments a day, multiple reactions a day, right? There can be all this activity without actually making anybody feel like they're any better today than they were yesterday, or feel any more empowered to create a different and better tomorrow than they do today.

And, you know, what Jeff points out based on his research, right, his academic research, in addition to what he experienced as the spouse of somebody battling cancer, is that games have a high retention, right, of interest, of participation. Games retain people because their effort, the person's effort, the player's effort actually produces consequence, right? If a gamer sits out of a game, right, they don't log into their game for weeks, months, years. When they go back, nothing has changed, right? They have, it's frozen in the last time they put down their controllers.

But every time they come back to the game, they move forward. They have a chance to make a different outcome. And in a lot of games nowadays, you know, they are written so well.

I mean, most of them are, you know, better than a big screen movie. They're written, and then even better than those old school choose-your-own-adventure books, right? They're like a combination of the two, right? The gamer does this today, and it makes something happen tomorrow, whereas if they would have done something entirely different, they would have changed the whole outcome. And so games retain people because their effort, you know, produces consequence, but most communities don't.

Most communities aren't retaining their members because they're not necessarily tying what the members do to any obvious outcomes in the group. And part of that just happens to be because a lot of people who are running communities aren't professionals, right? They're just like interested in biodiversity, and so they start a native plant gardening group for people who live in their county. They're interested in food security, right? So they start a Facebook group that is focused on food distribution and public food pantries and the like.

Or they're interested in a school issue, right? And so they're starting a community maybe in person that is focused on how to get a particular issue in front of the school board, how to maybe, you know, get a proposed policy change, how to get backers for that change. They're not focused on getting people to come back meeting after meeting, session after session by showing how everybody's participation made a difference. And so, you know, I think the first thing we need to do is we need to address what the difference between participation and contribution is.

Because I think we know it, but we don't know it, right? Because we use the words interchangeably. But participation is presence. And in many times, presence doesn't have to have any consequence, right? Because we're talking about, I mean, think about the participation trophy, right? People like to make fun of participation trophies nowadays, like everybody gets a trophy, right? All the kids on the team get a trophy whether they won the championship game or they didn't.

And because, you know, participation just says, were you here, you know, were you on the team and did you show up? Okay, here's your trophy. Now, you know, this, if we're going to translate that into an online community space or community space, right? It's examples look like liking, commenting on posts, voting in polls, attending events, right? That works in online communities and offline communities, right? Did you show up to the meeting at the Elks Lodge? Did you not show up to the meeting at the Elks Lodge? Did you log in to Zoom? You know, if the meeting was hybrid or entirely online or did you not? You know, are you showing up in approved ways? That's participation. And though showing up is not easy, especially in in-person environments, you know, talk to anybody who doesn't have a driver's license, talk to anybody who lives in a town that doesn't have public transportation, doesn't own a car, maybe has, you know, fewer cars than driving adults in their household.

Showing up in and of itself takes effort. But, you know, when it comes to participation, you're showing up in very defined, specific ways. You show up online, you show up in person.

And beyond the effort it takes to get there, participation is really safe, right? You just have to show up. You don't even have to talk, just have to show up. And it's inclusive, right? Because anybody who can get there gets to be there, right? Gets to participate, right? You can have a room full of people.

I went to a meeting not too long ago and it was in, it was not an Elks Lodge, but it was in that type of environment. And there were probably 30 chairs set up in the room and 25 of them were taken. But you know what? During Q&A, only three people spoke, right? So participation, it's safe, it's inclusive, it's low risk.

Nobody is going to make you do anything more than sit in your chair, whether we're talking sit in your virtual chair or sit in your in-person chair. And participation is pretty easy to scale if you think about it, right? All you need to do is have enough chairs in the room. You know, participation in an in-person event, it's the size of the venue that affects how many people can participate.

In an online space, it's unlimited, unless the owner or the builder chooses to limit it. But contribution, contribution is a whole other ballgame, isn't it? Contribution is action that changes the system, even slightly, even incrementally. It answers the question, not were you here, but did what you did matter, right? Did you shape decisions? Did you help to solve a shared or collective problem brought up in the space? Are you or did you mentor other members? Did you help moderate or facilitate conversations between fellow members or between, you know, the leadership team? I'm thinking in a like civic club or organization, that hierarchy, you know, between the leadership team and the general membership.

Are you helping to build by growing the group or by ensuring that all members of the group know when the meetings are taking place and have every opportunity possible to show up and to offer their contribution? Are you the person who grabs the mic and says, you know, I saw several hands in the back of the room, would one of you like to speak up, right? Are you inviting additional contributions from other people who maybe aren't always called on or aren't always noticed? Do you carry responsibility for your part of the whole? And what I mean by that, you know, there's an Aristotle quote that I always mix up, but right, it's like the sum, like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right? Are you taking ownership and responsibility for your part in the collective? Or are you saying, well, I'm part of the collective and if somebody else in the collective does a thing, you know, I'll support that, right? Like somebody else can do it, right? We've all heard that, right? You know, the anybody, somebody, nobody thing. When we think that somebody else is going to do it or anybody could do it, very often nobody does it. And so the difference between the two here is that participation is about inclusion.

Inclusion is very important. We want to invite as many people to the table as we can, right? That's important, right? We are better together. We want to invite as many people to the table, but contribution is about trust because you got to stick your neck out when you contribute and trust is where belonging actually forms.

So we think belonging comes from, I paid my membership dues, I signed a membership card, I added my name to a list, but it's really when we trust either the people or the process enough to make real contributions, to stick our neck out, to be vulnerable, to put forth some additional effort in affecting change. That is when undeniably we feel like we belong. So if that's where belonging lies, right? If belonging is really about contribution more than it is about participation and people are so hungry for belonging.

I mean, we hear that all the time. People talk about the loneliness crisis. I actually believe that we don't have a crisis of loneliness so much as we have a crisis of belonging.

We have people who are in crowded rooms feeling like they don't belong more. And if people really want to belong, like, you know, it's like, why don't they? Why is contribution rarer and harder than participation? And I think it's because first, contribution introduces uneven impact. Okay, you and me can be side by side and we can be working our hardest to make a difference.

Let's just say, just to make things simple, right? We're having a discussion of signs and I want the signs to be blue and you want the signs to be yellow. And so I'm going to work really hard to make a case for the signs to be blue and you're going to work really hard to make the signs yellow. And one of us is going to get our way.

One of us is going to influence the whole to where we either end up with blue signs or we end up with yellow signs. Now, maybe it's because blue signs are cheaper than yellow signs. Or maybe it's because yellow signs align with, you know, a color scheme that's already in existence and so it wins.

But in general, what contribution does, right, by both of us doing everything we can to get the signs ordered in our chosen color, it shows everybody, including us, that equal contribution does not equal even impact. I can do my best. You can do your best.

I can work my hardest. You can work your hardest. And one of us is still going to walk away not making as much of an impact as the other.

And that's hard. It is hard to acknowledge that you gave it your best and your best wasn't good enough in this specific scenario. So contribution introduces uneven impact, which is tough.

Contribution also creates accountability. How many times have you been in an organization that if like you bring up the idea, guess what? Guess what? You're now in charge of implementing that idea. You know, there are a lot of people who like to have a lot of ideas and a lot of thoughts, but they don't actually want to do anything when it comes to bringing those ideas and those thoughts into a reality.

So, you know, contribution makes that accountability. It's like, are you going to do that? You know, do you think that that's an important enough thing that you are willing to lead the charge? The other thing, as I mentioned in my blue sign versus yellow sign hypothetical example, it allows failure, right? We win some, we lose some. And sometimes it's not sustainable.

Sometimes contribution means that something will break if the lead contributor leaves. So, you know, I think about this in the case of like longstanding groups. So I used to be part of a mom's group.

And before I was the leader of the mom's group, we had some amazing like arts and crafts meetups. They were great. They were so nice.

I am not a crafty person at all, but they were incredible. But when the person who led those arts and crafts meetups, you know, transitioned out of the organization, which she had every reason to do, right? You're allowed to, you're allowed to come in, you're allowed to leave. And I became in charge.

We did not have in-person craft meetups because I don't have a crafty bone in my body. So I was not capable of leading them. And I wasn't capable of getting anybody else to lead them.

I just didn't have the skill set to like help somebody else see how that could be possible because the other person was so good, they left big shoes to fill. So, you know, the arts and crafts component of the organization, those great meetup groups that were so wonderful and so valuable, both for, you know, membership growth and retention, those went by the wayside. Now they were replaced by meetups and, you know, subgroup, sub interest-based subgroups that I am a little bit more akin to, you know, we had a freezer meal group and we had recipe exchange groups and we had coffee chats and play dates and things like that.

Those were things I could, you know, wrap my brain around. And then when I exited the organization, some of those things did not continue, right? Not, I don't think anybody else was as excited about freezer meals as I was excited about. So that group went by the wayside, but other groups took its place, right? Other interest-based subgroups took the place.

But it doesn't change the fact that people who really enjoyed the freezer meal group or really enjoyed the arts and crafts group felt like something they valued deeply was missing when it disappeared. So, you know, contribution can mean that something will break when the lead contributor leaves. And I think that's why we all love to focus on participation, because participation protects our comfort, right? We just, can we get, you know, we had 15 people last month, can we get 15 people this month again? And because contribution changes outcomes, it's risky, right? Change is risky.

Back to what Jeff said, you know, the issue with Jeff's wife having cancer wasn't so much the fact that she had an illness or a disease, it was how helpless he felt, right? And, you know, in many ways, and this is what he recognized with the games, right, is people will disengage when nothing they do can alter the trajectory of the inevitable, right? Of what's going to happen. And so when we're looking at communities, and we see this all the time, right? Somebody comes into a community and maybe the community is shifting and they hang out a bit, and they say, hey, you know, maybe we should do this, or maybe we should do that, and nothing happens, and then they leave, right? They leave because nothing they did or said changed the trajectory of the community in the place they wanted it to go. And if they feel helpless, right, if members feel helpless, if people feel helpless, that ends up oftentimes being a design failure of the community space than it is a motivation failure.

Now, this is something that happens a lot, right? We start to think like, oh, well, nobody is coming to the meetings because they don't want to leave their house. Nobody wants to leave their house when it rains. Nobody wants to leave their house on a Monday night after dinner.

You know, it's hard to compete with television. It's hard to compete with kids sports games or, you know, whatever, maybe, if we're talking about an in-person event. But it's very rarely a lack of motivation that gets people to stop participating, to stop contributing.

It's usually just the feeling of helplessness. Whether I'm there or not, nothing will change, right? The meeting is going to have the same five people talking, and they're going to be voting on the same stuff, doing the same stuff that they would be doing if I wasn't there, you know? So my presence is irrelevant. And I do think that those of us who build communities, we can design communities that control for that helpless feeling, right? It's like we have to design spaces where people feel like their presence matters, and they see that their presence matters.

So if belonging isn't about showing up, if it's not about engagement metrics or attendance or visibility, maybe, if it's actually about being trusted with something that matters, whatever that something is, then the harder question we have to ask relates to the fact that contribution doesn't just happen on its own. Like I was just saying, someone has to design the container. They have to write the rules.

They have to enforce the rules, which I think most people dislike more than they dislike writing rules or following rules. Enforcing the rules is the least fun part of community in many cases. Someone needs to decide what counts as help, right? What contributions make the biggest difference? Which contributions do we listen to, do we absorb and honor versus which ones do we ignore? And this brings us to the second half of the topic, because this is a question I get a lot as a community strategist.

And there tends to be two very distinct camps, right? And the question is, can you ethically manage or even effectively manage a community that's built around a market identity or lived experience that you're not part of, right? And this question can make some people defensive, especially if they're professional community managers. And I totally get this, right, because underneath it isn't really a question about your credentials or your qualifications. It's a question about power.

And let's talk about that. And then we'll wrap up and I'll let you on your merry little way. So when we're talking about stewardship, power and community management, right, that stewardship piece, that power piece all kind of fall under these discussions about ethical community management.

You have to first acknowledge the real concerns, you know, the real concerns are that the manager can get centered over the members, right? If the manager is not part of the community, then they may design something that's based on their convenience, their comfort over what the members really need, right? Like I, I'm just going to use an example here. If I feel like, okay, I don't actually know enough on this topic to be able to tell people, you know, is it better one or better two, then I'm just not going to answer any questions on this topic. Or I may just say, you know what, this topic is outside the scope of this group.

And then I can avoid that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing the answers, right? And so I'm creating rules and policies and practices around my comfort so that I don't have to deal with what I don't know. I don't have to learn things that are foreign to me. Sometimes you'll see like almost a performative inclusion where, you know, you're like, well, you know, not part of this group, but I know enough about them, I can pretend.

And pretending only gets you so far. Also, when you're not part of the group, you may not be quite in touch with how people talk, their jargon, their tones. And so sometimes you can be a little bit overly controlling in how you moderate behaviors and comments and such, because you're just not familiar with that tone.

And, you know, the tone policing, the performative inclusion, centering the manager over the members, these are all risks that if you are a professional community manager, you can't ignore. And if your inclination is to ignore risks like that, you probably should ask yourself whether you should be managing these spaces at all, because it indicates that you don't quite have an understanding of what makes people tick and why people gather together in online spaces. So first, you know, I think it's important to recognize that members and community managers, or we call them stewards, if you will, have different roles and responsibilities within the community, right? The community members are expected to hold their lived experience.

They are expected to be there with the sum total of their life experiences and share them as it relates to the topic of the community. So I love to use the example of recovery communities, because most people understand at some level that there is communities built around people who are addicted to a thing and no longer want to be addicted to that thing, but that that's really hard and it can be like a lifetime, lifelong challenge for them, right? So they come into a recovery community, they have their entire life experience, and a complete awareness that their life experience is not the same as somebody else's, right? Maybe they drank or did drugs because of a traumatic childhood, while somebody else partied hard in college, and while they graduated from college, they never graduated from college-level partying, right? It could be that simple. So everybody brings their lived experience into the situation, and they hold space for their lived experience and use that lived experience to support others in the group to help them to mentor them.

The community members define the meaning of the group. You know, as a professional community manager, I would love to tell you that I call all the shots in all the communities, but honestly, it is so much easier to get the right people in a community and let them help you to define the scope of the group and the boundaries of the group, and to work together collectively as they define what the group means for them, than it is for you to try to beat them in over the head with what you want the community to mean for them. The community members actually decide what mattering feels like, right? They know when they feel like they matter, and if you can help them put language around what that looks like and what that feels like to them, then you can help other people feel that way as well, but ultimately they decide what mattering feels like for them.

And then on the stewardship side, right, those of us who are community managers, we design the conditions for the contributions, right? We're there to facilitate the conversations and create the conditions under which they feel safe to participate. We're the ones who protect the pathways for agency. We're the ones who ensure that the power dynamic flows toward members, not against members.

Something that I say very often when I'm talking to other community leaders, when I'm talking to business owners especially, is that belonging doesn't require sameness, it requires responsibility. So let me give you a couple of examples of what that looks like in communities I've been in, right? So especially when we're talking about conditions for contribution, protecting pathways for agency, ensuring power flows toward members. So there's a community that I used to lead for several years, almost a decade, and one thing that we found is it was truly a community that never slept.

It was global, so somebody was online all the time. And it was a community that was emotionally vulnerable and that sometimes manifested as the looking a little bit like neediness. They weren't really needy, they're just emotionally vulnerable, right? They feel very sensitive about the stuff that they would share.

It took a lot of trust building to get them to share. And so they would post all hours, but members would get offended if their post went a certain amount of time with no response, but then they saw somebody else's post get what they perceived to be instant response. And so one of the ways that we controlled for that, a condition that I designed for that specific community is we had all posts held for admin approval.

Now, we had to, you know, this like was a risk benefit negotiation, because on one hand, you want people to write a post and immediately see it go up, right? And there's satisfaction, like, oh, my post went through, it was seen, okay, I'll wait for somebody to respond. And sometimes people can respond immediately. But if that post gets put up, and at the same time as six other people post, that post can get lost as well.

But if all the posts are held for admin approval, then an admin can go in, approve the post, respond to it, approve another post, respond to it, approve another post, respond to it, right? No post gets lost. So that's an example of designing conditions for contribution, right? We were able to, as we approved each post, we could respond to it, we could tag other members who might have something to contribute. And we really did enrichen the experience by controlling the flow of new posts.

Now, not everybody loved that. Some people felt like we were censoring because, of course, they can't see which posts we reject versus approve. So their assumption is that we must reject posts if we approve posts.

We never rejected posts unless they broke the rules, and almost nobody in that community ever broke the rules. That's an example of designing conditions for contribution. And it's also an example of the conversation you have to have with yourself and your team to decide whether that makes sense.

Protecting pathways for agency, this comes up a lot in communities that are around some kind of self-improvement. So if it's a weight loss community, if it's a clutter organization community, if it's a fitness community, if it's a parenting community, somebody may say that their child is really like struggling at play dates and they're looking for solutions, but maybe they add in there that they don't make their child share because in the real world, as an adult, you're not obligated to share your stuff, right? So they don't want to make their child share. And then somebody else comes in and talks about how you're going to raise a self-centered child because you haven't taught them to share.

As a community steward or community manager, to protect the pathways for agency is to come in and say, you know, we don't all parent the same here, which is perfectly okay. Part of what makes this group amazing is that all of us want the best for our children and are trying to raise the best humans possible, and we're all doing it in different ways. So while you don't have to agree with the fact that Susie doesn't make her child share, you do have to respect the fact that Susie has a right to parent her child however she wants.

So let's just bring this back to Susie's real question here, which is probably not about should I let my child share or not because she'd already made up her mind. And then ensuring the power flows toward members is really about, you know, top-down versus bottom-up communication. There was a community that I used to be involved in.

I did not lead this community, and everything was very top-down. It was like, nope, like I am deleting this comment because I don't like it, and you can't do anything about that because I said so. There was never any time or I would even go so far as respect to say respect given to members to explain why admin team made the decisions that they made to explain why this post stayed up but this post went down because the owner of the community was very much like, you are a guest in my space.

This is not our space. This is not your space. This is my space.

You are a guest here, and if you don't like it, leave. And people left, right? As they would. But, you know, a different approach is to say, you know, to create an environment where even if your members, you know, even if it's not a true democracy, right, and your members can't vote on everything, there is at least a power dynamic in place where they feel like they can contribute, make a difference, affect change, even if it's as simple as, you know, help us decide our theme for the upcoming month.

That can be that easy. So, again, you know, to reiterate, right, like, belonging doesn't require sameness. We don't have to all do the same thing at the same time in the same way, but it does require responsibility, taking responsibility for the container that you build, the way you are facilitating conversations to support or to not support contribution, and the consequences that come from that, right? You know, going back to Jeff Yoshimi in episode 16, right, he didn't claim to be the end-all be-all authority on cancer, on gaming, or on using video games to potentially come up with treatments or cures for cancer.

He just set out to build a bridge. He set out, you know, the whole purpose of the book is to present the idea that, hey, gamers are creative and they are relentless when it comes to pursuing the goal of winning their game. What if we built a bridge between medical science and gaming and gave gamers the opportunity to see how doing what they do best, solve complex problems within a game atmosphere, how that could actually influence and change modern medicine or medical science? He also built the bridge by explaining that intelligence is not a monolith, right? Every intelligent person doesn't think the same way, doesn't have the same expert level of knowledge, that you can be a medical science expert and you can be a gaming expert, and using your expertise in gaming, even if you don't have a ton of knowledge on the medical science front, could lead you to contributing to a cure or a treatment.

Just like if you have knowledge of medical science, maybe you don't understand a lot about gaming, you can work with a game designer, however, to come up with a game that is both entertaining and useful. So what you want to be thinking about in terms of ethically managing communities or leading communities of which you're not a part of the target population, what you really just want to be thinking about is what is your role as the community manager, right? Like if you are there to be the voice of the community, that might be really, really hard if you're not part of it. But if you're there to lift up the voices of the community, right, if you're there to help the members who are part of the target population get a seat at the table and get their voices heard, then by all means, you don't have to be a part of the group, right? You just have to be able to elevate others and be able to make room for others.

If you get the freedom and the power to make changes to the community to shape the outcomes of the community without consent of its members, that can be tricky, that can be dangerous territory. But if your job is to design the space where others can matter, well then really what you are is a steward, right? So it's different managing a community that you're not directly part of versus one that you are. Several years back, I was asked to manage a community for a business association that was focused on a specific ethnic group that I am not part of.

That was tricky. The whole time, I wasn't sure that I should do it. In fact, I was like, you know, I could make some recommendations for people who are part of the same ethnic group and, you know, I think maybe it would be better if they ran it.

And the thought process was is because I wasn't, you know, the person who hired me believed that since I wasn't supposed to at any point in time talk about what I thought or what I believed and I wasn't supposed to directly answer people's questions, I was just supposed to default to the association's leadership team, that it didn't matter that I wasn't part of the ethnic group because all I needed to be able to do was ask clarifying questions and point people in the right direction to get the answers that they needed or point them to resources that were already created. And I will say that person, you know, the person who made that decision wasn't wrong, right? That made total sense, but what became very tricky in it is figuring out how to do that dance when I look like I look and anybody who saw me who saw my profile picture could see that I was not part of that ethnic population. It is something, you know, after I wrapped up that engagement, I was like, yeah, I'm never doing this again.

And it's not because it was hard. It's not because it was outside of my skill set in terms of what was being asked of me from a stewardship perspective. It was just it didn't make sense.

It was like with as much as this association focuses on this one ethnic population, they really need to, like, invest fully soup to nuts in having all community touch points, all membership touch points be with people who are part of that ethnic population. Okay, so to sum up, managing a community you don't belong to isn't necessarily a problem. The problem comes if you forget who it belongs to, right? So in this case of the business association that was focused on specific ethnic group, I never forgot who that community belonged to.

So I didn't have a problem managing it. I just would agree and would say that they would have been better served by somebody who was a little bit more in line with what the focus is of the group. But when it comes to a fitness group, you know, when it comes to a school group, I mean, this happens a lot of times, right? You're hired to run an alumni group and you're not an alumni of the school or you are hired to, you know, host a or run a community for, like, association members and you're not part of the association or you're not part of the profession that association, you know, supports or represents.

That's okay because all you need to do is learn about the association, learn enough about what matters to its members to effectively steward the community. Where you get in trouble is when you forget that it is their community and not your community, right? You're a steward. You are not the owner.

You cannot supersede the members and their needs for the community to truly serve them. So here's where I want to leave you, because this one's kind of long, right? Where I want to leave you is this, is that belonging, I'll keep saying this, is not sameness, right? Belonging does not mean we all look the same, do the same, feel the same. Belonging is in consensus.

It's not that we all agree and it's not always comfort, although comfort's nice, right? The communities that change people, change our real lives, right? Sometimes change the world are not the ones where everyone feels included all the time. They're the ones where people are trusted with something that matters and people trust that what they do matters. So if you're part of a community right now and you feel yourself drifting, I would bet it's not because you don't care, but ask yourself, right? But I would bet it's not because you don't care, it's because you feel like nothing you do seems to change anything.

And what I want you to hear is that that is not your personal failure, that's a design problem, right? The people who design the community have designed it in a way where it's hard for you to see that you matter. And sometimes the answer to that for you is to simply go to whoever's in charge and say, help me understand how I matter to this organization. Help me understand how I can support change here.

Like I've heard a lot of descriptions of the problem. Can you point me to a solution that I can participate and contribute to solving or to carrying out? And if you're somebody who stewards communities, right, like I do, whether it's formally or informally, here's the harder question for you, right? Are you inviting people to participate or are you inviting them to contribute in ways that actually make a difference, in ways that shape the outcomes? Are you focused on protecting comfort, your comfort, maybe the community owner's comfort, maybe the comfort of the curmudgeoning members, every group has a curmudgeoning member here or there, or are you protecting the meaning of your community, what it really stands for, what it was designed to do, designed to be? And, you know, maybe the most important question of all for you is who in your community is still being treated as an audience member, as a passive bystander, when they could actually be a co-creator, lighten the load for you, lighten the load for other people in charge and actually move the needle in getting all of the members to combine forces around what really matters most to them. So, you know, belonging doesn't come from being noticed, it comes from knowing that if you weren't there, something real would be missing.

That's what I want to leave you with today. I would love to hear your thoughts on this and if this is the sort of episode that has you going, yes, yes, this is the kind of conversations I want to have, I would invite you to become a supporting listener, right? This is a listener-supported show, at least for this time, and you can make a one-time or ongoing monthly contribution at tonya.link slash coffee, that's t-o-n-y-a dot link slash coffee c-o-f-f-e-e, and, you know, just ten five-dollar-a-month sponsors or supporters actually offset the cost of editing an entire episode. They take care of Anita's full work and if that means a lot to you, it means a lot to Anita for sure, she would say thank you, and it means a lot to me.

So with that, I will leave you until next time. If there are topics or communities that you think we should be covering in the future, if there are people you want me to interview, now's the time to let me know. I'm planning the next six months of recording and you can check the show notes for contact information or simply go to findyourfreaks.com and there will be contact information there.

Fill out a form, let us know who we should be down the line. Have a great one, I'll see you next time. That's it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.

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