One of my goals for 2010 is to build a more connected community around ItStartsWith.Us. We have somewhere above 900 members globally right now, all of whom are doing their small part to change the world. When I first started this group, I thought it would be kinda cool for this gigantic team to be working together without knowing who else was on it . . . kind of like this big secret underground thing. But as we went on completing our missions and helping others, I realized that it would actually be much more valuable to our team members if we could get to know the other people in our group and get a chance to interact with them, make connections, and form true friendships.

With that in mind, I’m going to be working to provide more opportunities for us to get together in 2010. We started last week with our first ISWU team meetup, held in Milwaukee. I sent out an open invitation to all group members, and a bunch of us met up to talk about the mission and vision for this upcoming year, discuss possible ideas for small and large group activities, and generally get to know each other a little bit better.

It lasted about 2.5 hours, and it was a lot of fun. We’ll have another one in springtime, where in addition to meeting new people, we’ll also come up with a meaningful mini-mission to accomplish while we’re together. Mari and I have already spoken about doing a joint ItStartsWith.Us / Foiled Cupcakes activity down in Chicago, so maybe that’s an option too.

Eventually as our group continues to grow globally, I think we can have meetups like this in different cities around the world, whenever one of our team members wants to take the lead and organize it. It’ll give our members a chance to get to know their local partners and build bridges that will hopefully last well beyond the ISWU stuff.

So that’s what we did last week — I’m pleased with how the first meeting went, and I’m looking forward to many more (and probably even a yearly conference with inspirational speakers somewhere on down the line).

Thanks to all who came, all who expressed an interest in coming but couldn’t due to distance, and all the rest of our team members who give 15 minutes of their week to help us change the world.

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• ItStartsWith.Us Is One Year Old Today
• A New ItStartsWith.Us Project: Love Drop