Cadre Today and The Outward Facing Clique

Good morning, Cadre. How are you? From across the silence, you are being heard and seen right now. Simply logging into Cadre has given you the opportunity today to be seen, to be known, to be heard. Isn't that the start of really great stuff? Bezovitz, I see you. I hear you here with you right now. Hey, Mel, how are you, my friend? Nice to see you this morning. We'll let it build back in for a second. Good morning, Cadre. You Will Be found. This song came on when I woke up this morning. I was like, wow, this is a great Cadre song.

If you're not a musical theater person. This is from the musical Dear Evan Hansen. The song's called you Will Be Found. It's a song exactly about that, about this young person who says, hey, I'm going to go ahead and create a pathway for people all around the world to be seen and heard and. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it? Yeah, it's Cadre. It's what we do right here. Well, if we've never shared time and space together before, my name is JC thanks for the opportunity to spend some time with you here now on Tuesday, when we talk about building community, about knitting people together, about inviting people to be as close to one another as they either literally are, or to remind everybody that we are on the same floating rock in the sky and that there is a.

There is a community that you are a part of. And it may be best expressed right now through your phone, through your computer screen. No matter where you are, no matter what's going on, every day you see my face, that friendly Cadre face that no matter what you can count on to be like, hey, I'm gonna go ahead and go see that guy. And as I mentioned, on Tuesdays, we talk about building community. C. and then Dr. Leslie Davis, Dr. D. Coming to you from St. Louis. Both of them also talking about the idea of a building community.

You may notice in the title of this live stream, there's a second title. It says the outward facing click. That's a concept that I came up with when I was youth directing back in the 2000s, in the first decade of this go round. And I would talk to the young people who I was building community with and I'd be like, y'all so often. Well, most of the time, because it's kind of built into the idea of the word of click. We build inward facing ones. We attempt to become a part of something. And once we're a part of it, we face each other and we go, okay, everybody, here's what makes us who we are.

And we turn inward rather than turning outward. My invitation to this group of people was, hey, face out. If you actually care about growing this thing or this thing being inclusive or accepting or diverse. Now again, if you don't care about having a community that's inclusive, accepting and diverse, please face inward. But if those are things that you want to be like, hey, everybody's welcome here. How often do we hear that you walk into a space, maybe maybe a gym or a house of belief or worship, and you go, everybody's welcome.

And then you walk in, you go, doesn't feel like it. Like, oh, you mean everybody's welcome as long as they change to be exactly like you. Okay, got it. If you are creating space for others, outward facing, click is a really great way to think about it. Here's the headline. The longer that you are a part of a community, the less it is about you and the more it is about the people who have yet to become a part of it. You may go, okay, yeah, that kind of makes sense. How do I do it? Invite people to have experiences together, Experiences that put everybody on the same playing field.

Here's an example. So again, back in the youth directing days, we would do these scavenger hunts. Let's say we would have 50 people. I would find enough adults with minivans and enough permission slips to go ahead and say, all right, Here are the 10 teams of five. They would all have an adult. They would all have a minivan. And then they would have a list of things they need to accomplish together before they would finish and attempt to win. And then off they would go. Off they would go into the world to do these things.

Sometimes it would be like, hey, go sing a love song in the lobby of a McDonald's restaurant. And you would have people who would go, okay, we want to win. We want to accomplish the task. So then all of a sudden, this group of people who didn't know each other yet would go into the lobby of a McDonald's and sing. Alright, here's the PG part of the story. There's this one time this young human named Ben and his team were crushing through, crushing through the scavenger hunt. And all jumped back in the van after completing a task.

And Ben's hand, pg. PG moment. Ben's hand got caught inside the van door when it was closing and Ben broke Ben's finger. Guess what? Ben refused to stop the scavenger hunt until they were. Until their team completed the tasks. Ben. Oh, Jules. Speak, Wonder. Wow, Nice to see both y'all sneaking into the party. You know how much I needed to see your face today, Jules. A lot. Capital letters, exclamation point. It's story time. So back to Ben. Ben broke his finger. Ben's like, nope, I need to finish this.

Why did Ben need to finish the scavenger hunt? It wasn't because Ben needed to win. It's because Ben was having a blast with Ben's team. Ben, all of a sudden was woven into the network of something, of being a part of. Of belonging. And the opportunity cost in that moment was, do I go deal with my broken finger or do I continue to enjoy being a part of this team? And Ben, permission slip in hand, he literally waved it. He's like, my mom said I can do this and that. It's my fault if I get hurt. And yeah, they finished and they won the scavenger hunt.

Now, Ben was a non emotion expressing straight, a quiet, male identifying human being who was a teenager. It wasn't easy for Ben to say, I am a part of something. But because there was an opportunity to experience something that brought everybody onto the same level. There was no expert. There was no, I've done this before. That was the opportunity at hand. How do we get found? Often it requires a space where other people get to be as vulnerable, as lost, as nervous as everybody else here is. So if you want to create a space that's welcoming for others, create a space where you walk into every day and you feel the same thing in your own way that that person who has not been there yet feels.

It's kind of a reverse cycled version of empathy, y'all. I hope you have communities that you walk into where you go, oh, my gosh, I don't know what's going to happen today. Or, oh, my gosh, there's a lot of new faces here today. Or, oh, my gosh, I hope someone sees me. I hope someone finds me today. I hope someone says, hey, how you doing? And you don't go into the weird way of saying, do you really want to know? Or is this just 2024? And that's how we say hello and we actually don't care? It's like, no, how about, how about we lay aside that jadedness and we actually assume that people desire connection?

Why? Because they do. They do. Guess what? You are a person. You are a person who deserves to be found. And at the same time, you are a person who has the opportunity to be just as accepting, just as aware that other people are looking to be found, too. Have a great day, y'all. I'll turn back on a little de Evan Hansen as we play out this morning, and I'll see you tomorrow.