Building community is easier than you think. Start a club

How do you make friends as an adult? Ask a stranger about their Tamagotchi. It might sound like an impractical piece of advice, but it's a tip that's worked for Twoey Gray, a 29-year-old artist who discovered that life hack by accident. 

The year was 2022 — not 1997, as you might imagine — and Gray was on a long-distance bike trip from Toronto to Halifax. She had packed her childhood Tamagotchi to pass the time, nostalgic for the days when a "screen addiction" meant obsessively caring for an 8-bit gremlin. But it also prompted questions from strangers. 

For Gray, talking about Tamagotchis felt like a throwback to simpler times. Growing up, if she spotted a plastic nugget slung on the wrist, lunch pail or knapsack of another kid, she knew she'd found a kindred spirit. And as it turns out, some things never change. On her trip, conversations about nurturing digital pets came easily, she says. "It felt like returning to a kind of relationship that we know how to do very well in childhood … and that's connecting over a shared language of play."

"Over the course of that journey, I felt like I learned so much and thought so much about community and the type of world that I want to live in," says Gray, so when she got home to Toronto, she was inspired to do something about it. "Making friends is something that's really difficult to do in your late 20s and beyond," she says. "If you're not making your friends at work or school, where can you actually do that?" You need some kind of shared interest, a shared activity, to bring people together. And if a Tamagotchi could be a conversation starter on the road, why not in her own neighbourhood?

Gray is now the founder of the Toronto Tamagotchi Club, a growing social scene that boasts more than 200 members by her estimate. The group convenes every other month in locations across the city, public spaces such as Grange Park and the Allan Gardens Children's Conservatory. At meet-ups, the first order of business is connecting Tamagotchis — a fundamental aspect of how you play the game, Gray explains. But members, most of whom grew up with the toy, are also just there to hang out. Sometimes they make crafts together or swap friendship bracelets. In early December, to celebrate the club's two-year anniversary, they threw their first makers' market. 

When Gray launched the club, she was responding to the "cultural crisis of loneliness" in a post-quarantine world. As a zine-maker, she had some basic experience with community organizing. (One of her print projects, Prudemag, "has become a little bit of a movement on its own," she says.) But she couldn't have predicted how her crowd of Tamagotchi enthusiasts would grow. 

People want more opportunities to connect face to face — to build community, to participate in group activities. That was one of the biggest themes to come out of the 2025 CBC Arts Trend Forecast, and Gray's been noticing the same thing.

"One of the most common comments I would get on [social media] posts from the Tamagotchi Club is, 'This is so great. I wish something like this existed where I live,'" says Gray. "I started to find that very interesting," she says. "People don't realize you can actually just do this yourself." And so, Gray wrote a 10-step guide for founding your own club, a blog post that's led to the creation of more than 30 new Tamagotchi Club chapters in cities around the world. Her guide, however, could apply to any kind of meet-up. "You don't need experience to start a club of your own," she says. Just do it. "The number one thing is to try."

Are you gutsy enough to go for it? Here's more tested advice from Gray and other folks who've founded creative clubs where they live.

First things first. What should your club be about?

Gray founded her club on a hunch: in a city as big as Toronto, she couldn't be the only person who still had a Tamagotchi. And as it happened, her guess was right. Attendance for the inaugural meeting was better than Gray ever expected. She made 10 new acquaintances that day, and many of those people are still part of the club.

"We are often mistaken when we think that we're the only one," says Gray. Your community exists. But if you want to find them, you've got to put yourself out there.

Your club's focus should feel true to you and the activities you're passionate about. That's been the experience of Anne Nesathurai and Gerardo Lamadrid Castillo, the co-founders of Craft Club in Ancaster, Ont. For the last two summers, the couple has hosted volunteer-led workshops in their backyard garden, free meet-ups they advertise to the public on Instagram. 

"It's just a first step for people to get interested in a variety of crafts," says Lamadrid Castillo — through Craft Club, everyone gets a chance to learn something new and share the experience with others. At a typical gathering, a group of a dozen Craft Clubbers might try basket-weaving and flower arranging or creative writing and pickling. No skill set is too niche. So if you're thinking of starting a club, pursue your own interests first — no matter how unique.

"Start with you," says Nesathurai. That's how Craft Club began. In the summer of 2023, Nesathurai was pursuing new hobbies — cyanotype printing and indigo dyeing. Both crafts required lots of supplies and outdoor space, two things she was happy to share with others. 

"It can be really tempting to think about your audience. What do other people want to do? What are things that would resonate with the community around me?"

"What's trending," adds Lamadrid Castillo. "Yes, what's trending," Nesathurai laughs. "But really, I think the best place to start is where you have a desire to connect with other people." 

Where should your club meet?

Potential venues are everywhere, as ShoSho Abotouk and Victoria Light have discovered. The duo co-founded the Montreal Crochet Club in early 2024, and in less than a year, the group's Instagram following has grown to more than 1,700 followers. Out in the real world, they're similarly popular. Since May, Abotouk and Light have been organizing ticketed meet-ups throughout the city.

"We want to give everyone a chance, no matter where they live in Montreal, a chance to experience our events," says Light, and so far, the club has taken over cafes, public parks, cocktail bars, yarn stores and even a movie theatre. Landing a venue can be as simple as asking, they say. "See what works for you," says Aboutouk. "It's not a difficult thing. It's just reaching out [to the venue] and seeing if they would be interested in hosting."

Keep things IRL!

Social media can help you spread the word. (It worked for the Montreal Crochet Club, which invested in targeted Instagram ads to promote their first event.) But according to Gray, don't worry about building a following on social before your first meet-up. The most important thing is to get out there. "I think a lot of people now assume that starting a club means I'm going to start a Discord server, I'm going to start an Instagram account," she says. "No, you have to start offline. Start with a meet-up date and go from there," says Gray. "It's very hard to generate community around something that is not rooted in any shared experiences." When we move things offline, she says, we remember we're all neighbours: people sharing the same spaces, the same city — "and your city is a magical place."

And if your club is about making stuff, there's a practical side to getting people together. For Aboutouk, crochet had always been a solitary pursuit. The only connection she had to the larger crochet community was through Instagram — "seeing all these other crochet artists or influencers." But for experienced crafters like her, the opportunity to be out of the house — swapping pointers and showing off her latest work in-progress — can be invaluable. Says Light: "When I'm crocheting, I'm sending pictures of my progress to my friends, and they're like, 'I don't crochet. I don't understand.'" she laughs. Now, she's part of a group that "gets it," and the experience is validating. Plus, she's built a community where members are around to help each other out, sharing techniques and advice.

Don't worry about numbers

On the subject of sharing … Nesathurai says it's the key to building a great community around your club. "Sharing the little project that you're working on, I think it can have a huge benefit," she says. "[Sharing] is how you grow a club, how you get other people to see the work that you do and inspire them to be interested." But don't stress if the only RSVP's for your meet-up were sent by your best friend and their cat. "Start slow," Nesathurai suggests. "Don't really worry about attendance."

"The goal, I think, is to find those authentic connections," and hang out with people who want to nerd out over lace-making or homemade kombucha or whatever — just like you do. "Quality over quantity."

At the end of the day, the most important thing is hanging out

You don't have to be an expert to start a club, says Gray, and the same goes for your prospective joiners. At the Montreal Crochet Club, even "knitters are welcome," says Light. "We don't discriminate [against] crafts." And as Abotouk has observed, a lot of members come out because they want to be part of the "wholesome" scene that's sprung up around the club. "They bring their own projects, and we're getting to know one another. It's really a girly community," says Abotouk, who's noticed the gatherings are particularly popular with folks who've just moved to the city. 

At the Toronto Tamagotchi Club, Y2K nostalgia might attract new members, but that's not the magical ingredient that keeps the community together. "I think that this club — as much as it is a Tamagotchi club — I don't think it is actually about Tamagotchi," says Gray. A lot of first-time visitors don't even own a digital pet. "Even myself, like I don't consider myself a diehard fan. I'm not a collector," says Gray. "I really do think it's the environment, the sense of inclusion, the sense of recognizing that, hey, we're adults and we all have challenging lives sometimes, but for three hours, maybe we can just play together. I think that is a really healing thing for people and that's what keeps them coming back."