NORA SMITH
Staff Writer
One gathering at a time, Priya Parker, facilitator, strategic adviser, educator and author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, helps people build and foster communities.
At 10:45 a.m. today, Parker will bring this expertise to the Amphitheater stage to kick off Week Nine, “The Importance of Gathering: A Collaboration with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.”
“I believe that everyone has the ability to gather well,” Parker wrote on her website. “My mission is to give you the courage, permission and know-how to design meaningful, creative gatherings — in the places we work, live and play — without all having to be the same.”
According to The Art of Gathering’s book description, “Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn’t and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings — conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp — and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience.”
In an interview on “The Ezra Klein Show,” Parker said today, people often overemphasize the space of the individual and the needs of the self rather than thinking about the larger group and gathering.
“Our ancestors, whichever community you come from, if you go back long enough, were gathering,” Parker said in the interview. “Whether their cave was clean or whether they had a boil on their shoulder or whether they had an overbearing mother-in-law, they were gathering. And so in modern life, there are so many reasons that we choose not to gather or we feel like we can’t gather, and it is keeping us apart from one another.”
Later in the same interview, Parker said anyone can participate in this art of gathering, but if Americans don’t start to gather more, larger conflicts can arise.
“Every legal expert in authoritarianism basically says the antidote to authoritarianism is connection,” Parker said in the interview. “It’s knowing your neighbors. It’s knowing, ‘Hey, how bad could they be? Their first concert was a Toni Braxton concert!’ It’s these tiny little social bridges.”
Further, Parker examined aspects of group life, which she said is a balance between “we” and “I,” and she gave advice on how to maintain harmony between the two.
“Part of group life is the tools we have to make sure we have enough voice as an individual, and also the tools we have to choose to give up some amount of freedom to be part of something greater than ourselves,” Parker said.
In addition to publishing The Art of Gathering in 2018, Parker provides The Art of Gathering Online Courses and multiple workshops and a variety of resources on gathering, which are all accessible on her website.
“Artful gathering is a lifelong practice that instills in you a curiosity, willingness and a generosity of spirit to ask: How might we do this differently?” Parker wrote on her website. “What does it look like to design a gathering that reflects who we are — in all of our differences — and the world we desire to build?”
Coming in September, Parker’s newest book, The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, in which she “explains that we can’t form and grow effective relationships without a fight,” according to the book’s description, will hit bookshelves. “She rejects the idea that conflict is abnormal or that good groups don’t fight. All groups change and evolve; indeed, it’s because people disagree that good groups flourish.”
