The best podcasts for Community Building

I'm passionate about intentional community design, member-led events, and the creator community economy. I launched my first community in 2020 as a wellness community, but then failed at my paid launch. Then I became a consultant and have since helped over 60 business owners build, launch, and grow online communities! I have a podcast called the Community Strategy Podcast, with interviews from over 100 community builders. Season 2 of the Community Strategy Podcast features excerpts from the Creator to Community Builder Book, which will be published in the fall of 2023. In Creator to Community Builder, you’ll learn how Community Strategist Deb Schell has helped over 60 business owners find calm in building, launching, and growing their online communities. Based on client case studies, community examples, and interviews, this book provides new community builders with stories, strategies, worksheets, templates, and checklists that help you take action, launch sooner, and build your next revenue stream. Save thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of your valuable time by getting the strategies that have worked for successful community builders, and find calm building your online community today! As a member of an online community, I learned that I can transform my life by bringing people into it that help me change my mindset, skillset, and abilities to reach new levels in career, health, and lifestyle. The group was called Location Indie, and it catered to professionals like me who are passionate about travel and working remotely. I joined quickly after finding them. It only took speaking with a few members to know I’d found “my people.” I felt like they understood me and the life I dreamed of. I yearned to travel while pitching stories, taking photographs, and writing. Ultimately, my experience with this community would inspire a completely different career path.

The Community Strategy Podcast interviews business leaders, community builders, and entrepreneurs who are working to find different ways to monetize their business. The podcasts I'm sharing are also focused on helping you learn as a community builder, manager, or host, how to build inclusion, belonging, and create an engaged space where people want to spend their time online. (and maybe in person!)

Online Communities have been around for a long time, and Meetup is the most common example I can think of about a company that focused on community building and made it a business, but they've struggled financially because our world struggles to see community facilitation, moderation, and management as a business service. The podcasts I'm sharing and the one I host is focused on helping bring to light the idea that an online community can be a bridge between people who struggle to change and those who want to implement change in our life. The people are a bit ahead of us can help those along the way. That's the benefits of a community ecosystem, based on shared wisdom. In order for this all to be possible, someone must be in charge of leadership, development, programming, management, and organization, this requires time and therefore should be compensated since this is time spent to help others enrich their life. However, most people assume that this isn't something that they should "Pay" for that it should be "free" like a lot of things - the problem is that we don't live in a world where people value things on the same level. The future is full of challenges, complex ideas, and difficult conversations, but community builders are the bridge builders between these concepts and help guide our understanding, help us be more human, and develop better communication and socialization skills, very much needed in this post-pandemic society.