On a grey April day, several dozen Torontonians gathered at the Society Clubhouse in Little Italy for the inaugural meeting of the west-end chapter of Social Club 150, a friendship group for folks in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
And within 30 minutes, they were spilling their guts.
No, there wasn’t some kind of bad seafood being passed around. The attendees, seated at tables in groups of eight or nine, were taking turns responding to the event’s conversation prompt “what person or event changed your life for the better?” It’s a common icebreaker at Social Club 150’s conversation socials. Founder Keely Kemp started the organization last summer with an east end chapter; her chatty — and phone free — events became so popular that she recently launched a west end chapter to help west-siders “choose connection over the couch,” too.
One of Kemp’s main inspirations was a visit to a 12-step meeting with a friend to celebrate an important anniversary. Being in that church basement brought back so many memories of warm gatherings and community: Girl Guides, Pancake Tuesdays. “The people were welcoming, kind; there was an openness, sharing and a fellowship. I had this feeling of belonging even though I was only a visitor,” she remembers. “I said to my friend, ‘I wish there was a meeting like this for all of us.’”
Kemp named her group Social Club 150 after Dunbar’s Number, the theory that humans can maintain 150 meaningful social connections at one time; this is why each chapter will be capped at 150 members. Running the organization is now her full-time job, and she has plans to start midtown and downtown chapters this year. People can either buy memberships or attend on a drop-in basis.
Pull up a chair at one table that evening and you’d witness eight snapshots of human life. One woman shared how a friend donated a kidney to her daughter. A man recalled his spontaneous marriage proposal at the end of the driveway (she said yes, and was there with her husband that night). A poet detailed how she met an artist in line for coffee who set her poems to music. Look around the table and people are smiling, nodding, interjecting, laughing — connecting. And no one is on their phone. After the conversation period, there was a final 30 minutes of mingling: one person agreed to try out a sport with a new friend, another arranged to start volunteering with an organization their tablemate mentioned.
After starting with conversation events, Kemp expanded Social Club 150 into other kinds of gatherings, helped along by members who volunteer as “connectors,” welcoming the shyer members and keeping the convos going. She’s hosted life-hack evenings where people share their best need-to-know tips (the most useful ones are going in a Social Club 150 compendium) and is starting a “get and give” night where attendees bring problems for the group to tackle en masse. They’ve learned to play mahjong together, and they do board game, bingo, euchre and trivia nights. Coming up, there are other events like an “Antiques Roadshow”-inspired appraisal night, gardening lessons from a local Instagram star and a session on staying safe from cyber fraud planned. Field trips to line dancing, bowling, theatre, live music and karaoke are also on offer.
The only constant? There’s an event every two weeks. “Consistency was important in growing the community and in offering the structure for people to develop relationships. I envisioned a cadence to the club that would positively impact members’ lives,” Kemp says.
She has had hundreds of people attend events so far. Many Torontonians, it seems, yearn to improve their “social health” these days — and forge connections that actually last. “The news continually points out the dire warnings of the loneliness epidemic; a crisis of belonging, division and polarization; the rise in single-person households; and the fact that most of us live in cities that we didn’t grow up in and therefore don’t have strong long-lasting connections,” Kemp says. “I developed the concept in isolation and then poked my head up to find that the city is gloriously alive with so many different types of clubs and events focused on social connection.” At the west end launch, three attendees seated at the same table discovered that they were neighbours but had never met before.
Seral de Beaufort had always shied away from sharing in group settings or public speaking of any kind, but attending many east end chapter Social Club 150 events unearthed a new kind of confidence for him. “Ultimately, my capacity to actually share ideas out loud in the presence of about 20 complete strangers surprised me the most,” he says. “There is something fundamentally important about letting strangers in and finding a way to embark on new relations…Social 150 is a response to the virtual-reality trap. We mostly all exist online. We have a curated persona that we emit and many fall prey to the give-and-take of that artificial existence. This back-to-basics group is something more organic.”
As an introvert, Kelly Merriweather can struggle with stepping outside her bubble, yet yearned to do so anyway. Mid-life often means juggling a lot, she says, whether it’s raising kids, supporting adult children, caring for aging parents or just trying to keep up with work and life: “It leaves very little space to build new friendships, even when we want them.” She has also noticed that sometimes she genuinely connects with someone — then they both walk away without exchanging numbers. “It is like we are all out of practice when it comes to taking that next step,” Merriweather adds.
Just as it takes a village to raise a child, she says, it takes a village to care for elders, too. “People need connection at every stage of life,” she says. Now, Merriweather makes a point of attending as many Social Club 150 events as she can, where her favourite moments have been meeting people she might never cross paths with in her everyday life. “There is something really special about sitting in a room with people from different backgrounds and realizing how much we all have in common. It feels a lot like the best parts of being online, but without the masks we tend to put on for social media. Everyone shows up as themselves,” she says. “We are all there for the same reason, which is the desire for real connection. Those moments remind me how much community matters and how good it feels to be seen and welcomed.”
