How We Launched an Abundance Community in the DC Area

Including how you can join the email list and an upcoming event!

My friend

Abigail Olvera

and I hosted the first of hopefully many DC-area meetups to build a community around the Abundance movement on Saturday, May 3rd. If you live or work in the DMV and are interested, you may sign up for the email list for future events here and RSVP for a Saturday, June 7th, state capaciTea party in DC here.

This is the story of our intentions for the community (spoiler alert: build community), how the first event came together in 9 days, and the fun we had with ~50 attendees. My role was helping to get this going, which mostly entailed telling Abi, ‘Yes, you can do that!’ She had the vision and did most of the actual work, so my hat is off to her.

My biggest lesson learned: Abundance is not only nonpartisan but also bipartisan.

I met Abi through Emergent Ventures, a grant program overseen by economist and infovore par excellence

Tyler Cowen

. I received a grant for YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, while Abi recently received one to write about Progress studies. I warmly encourage you to subscribe to Abi’s Substack newsletter Positive Sum! Abundance and positive-sum thinking will be critical to making U.S. politics functional again.

A conversation about organizing a get-together for DC-area Emergent Ventures winners quickly evolved into Abi wishing to bring together people in our region who want to write about and help advance the abundance agenda, from housing to infrastructure and transportation to state capacity to scientific innovation.

Building community for its own sake was our goal: helping like-minded people meet and socialize in person; cultivating relationships with the side-effect of building each other up and advancing Abundance. Abi had clearly been thinking about it for a long time. I eventually suggested just giving it a go and we were off to the races.

We set a date — the Saturday after next; figured out a location (Abi’s friend’s house); then invited folks and spread the word. For RSVPs, we used the trendy app Partiful, which worked well (but does not capture emails or interface with calendar apps).

I shared the event with local YIMBYs and many like-minded friends. Abi shared it with some tech and biotech-focused groups and in effective altruism circles, which is probably where it got picked up by the leader of a DC fan group for Scott Alexander’s blog Astral Codex Ten. We also shared it with our EV friends, of course, as well as contacts at think tanks like Niskanen and Inclusive Abundance. It helped that we consciously kept everything casual: No monetization, no org or organizational affiliation, no real agenda beyond connecting people. Relationships were the point.

Interest quickly snowballed. A robust 48 people RSVPed “Going” while another 53 said “Maybe,” which was fine because the event space could handle about 100 people in a pinch. We estimate about 50 people ended up attending, maybe a few more. It reminded me of the lightning in a bottle feeling I had in the initial months of YIMBYs of NoVA, which started as a fast-growing Facebook group. We caught a wave.

Abi provided home-cooked Mexican food. I arrived with five Costco pizzas. After giving everyone a chance to arrive and mingle, we got their attention, thanked them for attending, then, after some group discussion, created three topical groupings: housing, state capacity, and “hard sciences” for folks interested in biotech.

Abundance discourse tends to skew left, which we wanted to avoid. Fortunately, Republican policy pros were quite well represented at the event, reinforcing to me that Abundance is not merely a project to navigate the Democratic Party out of the political wilderness. After all, Texas and other red states are building lots of housing and energy infrastructure — green and fossil fuel — not to mention a pro-growth regulatory state.¹ A GOP attendee earnestly told me that including Republicans is important because many of them are big believers in Abundance and, he argued, the movement can constructively fill a vacuum of policy ideas in right-wing populism.

I was deeply encouraged by the discussion on state capacity. The tone was measured and respectful, with virtually no tension. Speakers were quiet and careful, the room listened attentively. There was lots of nodding and respectful agreement, not just respectful disagreement. Points were made about bureaucracy, procurement, implementation, and how to make things better before the next election — refreshing in this town that equates winning with advancing an agenda.

Many attendees knew each other, but new connections were clearly made. Folks were energized. As they left, people kept telling us, “I cannot wait for the next event!”

Delighted with how that evening had gone, we turned our attention to the future. We set up the Google Form for emails. It was immediately flooded by about 2,300 spam entries, so we added verification, which is why the form asks for emails twice.

Now Abi is planning the state capaciTea party for June 7th, while I am stepping back to focus on being an overwhelmed father of three young kids other projects.² Even if you cannot attend the tea party, RSVP ‘no’ to add your name to the list, along with filling out our email contact form. And please do share with kindred spirits.

This is another opportunity for me to remind you, dear reader, that you can do stuff — host a party, call a friend, whatever. Connect with the people around you! It is the best!

What does long-term success look like? We imagine an exchange of ideas and policy concepts, sure, but more than anything else, we hope for new friendships and lots of laughter in a community that people want to be a part of. Abi set up a place for people to write what Abundance means to them. I scribbled, “People flourishing together.”

Thanks to my 1,155 subscribers, especially my 18 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I founded the grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and live in Alexandria near DC.

1. Semi-related,

Gary Winslett

persuasively argues in a Washington Post op-ed that the Midwest lost many manufacturing jobs to the Sun Belt. The South has become a hotbed of automotive production. Our country as a whole has also, depending on your perspective, lost manufacturing jobs to massive productivity increases from automation.

2. Thanks to my wife and editor, the real MVP who got our kids to bed while I played co-host.