Most of our Sentientism community building so far has been global and online, but we now have our first location-based groups and hope to see many more. We’ve even had our first “in real life” meetup and hope to see many more.
If you’d like to set up a country or city or region-based Sentientism group please go for it. I’d love to help you in any way I can, including listing you below. Get in touch via one of our online community groups, @sentientism social media accounts or via hello@sentientism.info. I’ve also shared some general advice lower down this page that might help get you started.
Aotearoa / New Zealand: Sentientism Aotearoa FaceBook Group
Indonesia: Indonesian Sentientism FaceBook Group
Scotland: Edinburgh: Sentientism Edinburgh Hub on Telegram and on FaceBook
England: Sentientism England Group on FaceBook
England: London: Sentientism London Group on WhatsApp
USA: Los Angeles: Sentientism: LA FaceBook Group
Sentientism is just a worldview so there’s no governance / organisation / membership / money / formal processes… So my informal suggestions re: setting up local groups include:
1) Choose a social media platform to focus on. Signal can be good if you need confidentiality if naturalism (“evidence and reason”) or sentiocentrism (“compassion for all sentient beings”) are socially, politically or legally risky things to be discussing. Otherwise just choose where people are most likely to be
2) Invite people to join you there. I’d like all Sentientism groups to be open to anyone interested in these ideas, not just people who agree with the Sentientism worldview!
3) Invite me (Jamie) too as I’d love to stay in touch with local groups and help out. I’m also comfortable being an admin alongside you / others if you’d like
4) Message me your email and I can invite you to our Slack group where other Sentientism group facilitators (and others working on Sentientism in general) share ideas
5) Feel free to re-share content from sentientism.info or from our other groups as you see fit. You can use our “S” logo or the animal eyes graphic for the group icons and backgrounds as an example
6) I’ll add links to your group(s) to our Sentientism.info groups list
7) Help the community develop the group however they’d like to see that happen. In person meetings can be a great step forward. Always need to be careful re: people’s privacy and security, of course.