You don't find community, you build it.

I was 23 and playing in a band. Back then, we had strong opinions about good music, and we were determined to change the world. The problem: we barely got any response to the demos we sent around. How on earth do you change the world when nobody will give you a chance?

Mission-driven work is about finding like-minded people. Not about being right. I was reminded of this at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg this week, when I sat on a panel about Finding Your Community in Electronic Music. There are roughly speaking two ways of finding your community, I told the audience.

In the first case, your community finds you. Wonderfully simple.

Someone gets in touch with a request for help, and you say yes. It happens more often than you'd think. When I had just started out as a freelancer, the lovely people at Cultuurloket, the Belgian cultural helpdesk, asked me to help them guide cultural organisations through the Covid crisis. It became the start of a beautiful four-year collaboration. When a neighbour asked if I could join the board of Filmhuis Klappei, I said yes. A few years on, I'm the proud chairman of the coolest neighbourhood cinema in Antwerp.

If you want to be found, the main thing is to make sure people know you exist — and that you're available for work. My blog, my newsletter, my talks... they're all touchpoints through which like-minded people can ask me for help.

But what about the second scenario? What if nobody invites you of their own accord?

If your community doesn't find you, you'll have to take matters into your own hands. After all, whatever is missing for you is probably missing for others too. That's exactly what we did with my youthful band that couldn't catch a break. Instead of wasting time mailing around demo tapes, we hired a small venue and organised a gloriously amateurish little festival with other bands. Shamelessly, we booked ourselves as the headliner.

After the show, people came up to me.

Not so much with compliments about the performance, but with the news that they played in a band too. And could I perhaps find them a slot on the bill at the next festival? It became the start of Undercurrent, a concert series we organised for years with a handful of like-minded people. I occasionally performed at those nights myself, but the mission was mainly to create space for other unknown underground artists. Not long after, my experience as a concert promoter landed me my first leadership role in the cultural sector. Everything I've built started there.

Sometimes your community finds you on its own. In every other case, you'll have to create your own place in the system. Before you know it, allies will pop up offering their help. To find your community, you have to build it.