TL;DR

When I became co-president of the Harvard female alumnae club in Miami, our events drew almost no one. Over time, I built a community from scratch — starting a WhatsApp group and personally recruiting women from other clubs, polling members on what they actually wanted, sending relentless weekly and day-of reminders to a famously busy Miami crowd, inviting prominent women to draw people in, and keeping our signature events consistent year after year. Eventually we were drawing 20-plus women per event — one even drove three hours to attend — and, more importantly, the women began relying on each other. Here's exactly how it happened, and what I learned about building community anywhere.

The Empty Room

There is a particular kind of silence that comes from an event no one attends.

I know it well, because in my early days as co-president of our Harvard women's alumnae club in Miami, I sat in it more than once. I'd graduated from Harvard with a head full of ambition and the belief that a shared alma mater was a kind of instant glue — that if you simply put "Harvard" and "Miami" and "women" in the same sentence and added a date, people would come.

They did not come.

I remember one early gathering vividly: a nice restaurant, a reserved table, a printed little sign with our club name on it, and me, checking the door every few minutes as the reservation window stretched and then quietly closed. A handful of people, if I was lucky. Sometimes fewer. The waiter would ask, gently, whether the rest of the party was still coming, and I'd say "any minute now" with a confidence I did not feel.

It would have been easy to conclude that Miami just wasn't a community town. That alumni here were too scattered, too busy, too consumed by the glittering chaos of the city to care about a club. But I didn't believe that. I believed the women were out there — brilliant, accomplished, probably a little lonely in the specific way that high-achieving women in a transient city often are. They didn't need convincing that community mattered. They needed someone to actually build the on-ramp.

So I stopped waiting for people to show up. I went and found them.

Going Door to Door (Digitally)

The first thing I did was almost embarrassingly simple: I started a WhatsApp group.

Email is where intentions go to die. It's formal, it's easily ignored, it sits unread behind nine hundred other unread things. But WhatsApp is where people actually live — it's casual, immediate, the place your friends and your group chats and your real life happen. I made a bet that if our club lived where people's attention already was, we had a chance.

Then came the unglamorous part, the part nobody tells you about community building: I went and recruited, one woman at a time.

I showed up at other clubs' events — other alumnae groups, professional women's networks, mixers, panels. I introduced myself. I had the same conversation a hundred times. "Hi, I'm one of the co-presidents of the Harvard women's club here — we're building something for accomplished women in Miami, a real support network, not just cocktails. Can I add you to our WhatsApp?" And one by one, phone by phone, I added them.

"You're really just going around adding people yourself?" one woman asked me, half-amused.

"Every single one," I said. "If I want this to be real, I can't outsource the beginning of it."

The group grew slowly, then less slowly. Ten women. Thirty. Fifty. It still wasn't a community — it was a list. But a list is where a community starts.

Asking Instead of Assuming

Here's the mistake I see most club leaders make, and the one I'd been quietly making myself: planning the events I thought people should want, instead of finding out what they actually wanted.

So I created a poll and sent it to the group. What kind of events do you want? Networking happy hours? Speaker panels? Wellness mornings? Book discussions? Intimate dinners? Career-focused workshops?

The answers reshaped everything. It turned out people weren't craving another loud, transactional networking event where everyone scans the room for someone more important to talk to. They wanted connection — smaller, warmer gatherings where real conversation could happen. They wanted to learn from accomplished women. They wanted the kind of friendship and support that's genuinely hard to find as a busy adult in a new city.

That poll did something subtle but powerful: it turned the women from an audience into co-authors. They weren't being invited to my events anymore. They were being invited to theirs.

The Relentless, Loving Reminder

Then I learned the hard truth about Miami: getting a "yes" is easy. Getting a body in a chair is a different sport entirely.

Miami people are busy. Not pretend-busy — genuinely overbooked, pulled in fifteen directions, juggling careers and social calendars and a city that never sits still. Someone could enthusiastically RSVP on Monday and have completely forgotten by Thursday, not out of rudeness but out of sheer volume.

So I became a reminder machine, and I made no apology for it.

Every week, I emailed the group about upcoming events. Then — and this was the real key — I reminded them again the day before, and again the day of. "See you tonight!" with the address and the time, sent that morning, was worth more than any amount of advance planning. People in Miami don't ignore you; they just need to be caught at the exact right moment, when the event is the next thing on the horizon and not an abstraction two weeks away.

"I swear, the only reason I ever make it anywhere," one member laughed to me at an event, "is your day-of texts. You're like my assistant."

I'll take it. Consistency of communication, I learned, is its own form of love. Showing up in someone's inbox every week, reliably, is how you tell a busy person you matter to this, and this matters.

I want to be honest that this part took discipline. There were weeks I didn't feel like sending the third reminder, weeks I worried I was being annoying, weeks when I'd drafted the message and hovered over the send button wondering if everyone was secretly tired of hearing from me. But every time I pushed through that doubt and sent it anyway, the room was fuller for it. I came to think of those reminders the way a lighthouse thinks of its light — not clever, not novel, just on, night after night, so that anyone looking for the shore could always find their way in.

Bringing in Women Worth Showing Up For

Once we had momentum, I raised the ceiling. I started inviting renowned women into the group — accomplished, recognizable women whose presence made an event unmissable.

This worked on two levels. Practically, a remarkable guest gives a busy person a concrete reason to clear their evening; "I might network" is skippable, but "I get to hear her speak, up close" is not. But the deeper effect was about identity. When impressive women started showing up, the group began to understand itself as a room full of impressive women. The caliber of the guests told every member something about her own worth: you belong in a room like this.

And something beautiful began to happen that I hadn't engineered and couldn't have. The women started relying on each other. The WhatsApp group, which had begun as my announcement channel, transformed into a living thing — women asking for doctor recommendations, job leads, advice on a hard decision, a contractor, a good lawyer, a shoulder. Someone would post a question at 9 p.m. and have five thoughtful answers by morning. They were no longer coming for the events. They were coming for each other. The events had just been the doorway.

Twenty Chairs, Filled

I'll never forget the first time I looked around one of our events and counted past twenty.

If you don't know Miami, that number might not impress you. Let me translate: getting twenty-plus busy, accomplished women to physically show up, on the same night, in this city, is genuinely hard. People who run clubs here know exactly how hard. Twenty was a small miracle, and then twenty became normal, and normal was the most satisfying word I could imagine.

The moment that crystallized it for me came when I learned that one of our members had driven three hours to attend. Three hours, each way, to be in that room. I found her during the event and thanked her, a little stunned.

"Are you kidding?" she said. "Do you know how rare it is to find a group of women like this? Where everyone's rooting for you instead of sizing you up? I'd drive six."

I had to step away for a second after that. Because that was the whole thing, right there, in one sentence. We hadn't just filled chairs. We'd built a place worth driving three hours toward.

The Power of Showing Up the Same Way, Every Year

There's one more decision that mattered more than it sounds like it should: we kept our signature events the same, year after year.

It's tempting, as a leader, to constantly reinvent — to feel like every season needs a fresh, novel program to prove you're working. But community isn't built on novelty. It's built on ritual. When the same beloved events come back every year, they become traditions, fixed points people plan their lives around. "Oh, it's almost time for our annual event" is a thought that builds belonging in a way a one-off never can. Consistency told our members that this club was permanent, reliable, theirs — not a flash in the pan, but a fixture they could count on for years to come.

Conclusion: What an Empty Room Taught Me

I think often about that early version of me, checking the restaurant door, pretending the rest of the party was coming any minute.

If I could go back, I'd tell her this: the empty room isn't a verdict. It's just the before. Community doesn't arrive on its own because you have a good name on the marquee — not even a name like Harvard. It gets built, deliberately and unglamorously, one added contact, one honest poll, one day-of reminder, one remarkable guest, one driven-three-hours member at a time. You have to go where the people already are. You have to ask them what they want instead of assuming. You have to remind them, lovingly and relentlessly, that they matter. And you have to show up the same way, again and again, until showing up becomes a tradition.

We turned an empty room into a sisterhood. The proudest part isn't the attendance numbers, though I'm proud of those. It's that somewhere in Miami right now, a woman is posting a hard question into a group chat at midnight, and a dozen other women she met through us are awake and ready to answer. That's the thing that lasts. The events were always just the doorway. The women were the home.