The Rooms We Built
The Friday night after Hurricane Helene knocked out the power across half the Upstate, a fellow in our first Taylors Fellowship cohort described what happened on their street. Kids spilled into the cul-de-sac. Adults dragged lawn chairs to the curb. Someone ordered pizza. People who had lived thirty feet apart for years introduced themselves: no screens, no routines, no agenda. Just neighbors, outside, talking.
Then the power came back on, and everyone went inside.
That story came up during a discussion of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, which documents in detail what most of us already feel:
Americans have fewer close friends than at any point we have measured.
Men have lost more than a third of their time with friends in a single generation.
Civic participation, the kind that used to happen in churches, Rotary clubs, and volunteer fire departments, has been declining for decades.
You do not need a study to know this. You can feel it on your own street. But Putnam's numbers confirm what the gut already knows: we are more connected than any generation in history and more alone than any of them, too.
Last August, we decided to try to do something about this. We put out an application, and several of you decided to join as well. They signed up for the Taylors Fellowship, which, at that point, was a program with a Latin motto, a reading list, and no proof that it would work. The deal was simple:
Eight Saturday mornings, August through April.
Roughly a book each month. A guest speaker.
Coffee and honest conversation with people you do not know yet.
No credentials required
Whenever we launch a new program, we know there will be things to work out. But I was pleasantly surprised by what landed.
Alan Jacobs argued in How to Think that becoming a better thinker requires becoming a certain kind of person, someone willing to hold ideas loosely and genuinely hear positions you disagree with before responding. One fellow called it the book that opened the most for him all year.
The Heath brothers, in Made to Stick, gave us language for why some ideas survive, and others vanish, and one fellow put it simply: "You can't make something stick if you don't know why it matters, but knowing why isn't enough if you can't help other people see it too."
C.S. Lewis, in a short essay called "The Inner Ring," warned about the desire to be on the inside of things, and then offered a twist: in its best form, the inner ring is just friendship. A fellow looked around the room and said, "This fellowship is an inner ring."
But the best moments were the ones I did not plan for. A guest speaker sharing something so personal, the room went quiet. A side conversation over coffee that turned into a real friendship. A fellow pushing back on a book's premise and forcing everyone to think harder.
None of this was a leadership program in the way most people use that phrase. Nobody learned a framework for climbing anything. What happened was closer to what used to happen in the rooms where communities were built before anyone thought to professionalize the process: A group of neighbors read serious books, talked honestly about what they read, and slowly became the kind of people who would keep showing up for each other and for the place they share.
We asked our fellows to rate the experience at the end. They gave it a 9.3 out of 10. I will take that. But the number I keep coming back to is not from a survey, it is from that cul-de-sac on the Friday night after Helene. Every person on that street already lived there. They already had chairs, pizza, and kids. Everything they needed for a neighborhood was already in place except the willingness to walk outside, and it took a power outage to supply it.
The Taylors Fellowship is one answer to that problem. Year Two starts in August. The cohort is small on purpose—eight Saturday mornings, same as before. Applications are open now through June 30 at taylorstownsquare.com/taylors-fellowship. The cost is $150 for the year, and scholarships are available.
Five people said yes to something unproven last year and then showed up eight times to prove it was worth doing. A second group starts in August. The rooms exist now. The question is whether you will walk into one.
