[Organizers] Re: maintaining contact with our communities

We can't dance without each other but we dancers have other overlapping interests. This happened kind of organically, but myself and a few other dancers scattered across the country started an ongoing movie night. We use Kast ( https://www.kastapp.co/ ), which is a program (or browser plugin) which enables users to stream their webcam or what's on their screen, so people can share movies and chat. Ours is a smaller private group which makes communication easier than if you tried to make a movie night with your whole local dance group (this way also you can find people with your interests / movie or activity preferences / political leanings). For musicians in our extended community that miss playing with others, there's another program that is a little more tricky to use than Kast, which is called Jamulus ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/llcon/reviews/ ). It's for jamming in as close to real time as you can get over the internet. It's a bit harder to figure out but there are guides, maybe read before downloading to know what you're getting into ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/jamulus-online-musicianssingers-jamming/idio… ) and I found a FB support group ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/507047599870191/ ) for help using it. These solutions, I suppose, are best for smaller groups. I like that we have our respective local Facebook groups open for dancers to communicate within, but I do wonder about the older dancers and other non-FB users in our dance group. There's always email that could go out to our dance members but then what would we say as just an announcement rather than back-and-forth engagement? And I do know some individuals are regularly checking up on people, if they have each other's phone numbers. It could be nice to share dancing videos with each other and talk about dancing, but for me personally, it usually makes me feel sad. The talking about and sharing of stories of dancing exist peripherally because of the dancing itself, which we can't do. In fact, we participate in what I'm convinced will be one of the last activities allowed again, after everything else has opened back up again. It's sad and scary and depressing but it's a good thing that we're trying to stay connected. I am mentioning that because I know there's a lot of people who dance who aren't as passionate about it as other people (like myself and other people on this list); so they may not care to stay in touch or it might make them feel worse to be reminded of something they can't do. I'm all for creative, opt-in ideas to connect each other. Hey, maybe local communities can do a sort of secret santa, except everyone cooks or creates something with things they have in the house, and then delivers it to someone else in the community. (People who don't want to touch things can leave it outside for 3 days, and we can encourage good hand hygiene during creation). I'm thinking art and food; trading sewing projects and books.... Just a thought!