This is JOIN 101’s second installment of “What are you doing alone that you could be doing together?” — a series highlighting civic innovators we’ve encountered on JOIN OR DIE’s community screening tour who have asked themselves this pivotal question…and put their answers into action.
This week, Jared Joiner shares his journey of answering a challenge to support local businesses with Revival Rounds, a monthly happy hour rotating across Oakland with the goal of, in Jared’s words:
Changing the narrative around crime and safety by encouraging people to reclaim and reimagine public spaces.
Getting more people to visit and support bars to ensure they remain vital community gathering spots.
Keeping local businesses thriving by bringing in consistent patronage.
You can listen to Jared’s story above and find the full transcript and helpful resources below. If you or someone you know is ready to follow Oakland’s example of supporting local businesses through regular group meetups — share this story…and let us know what you create!
Onward to the next American joining revolution,
Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis
Rebecca: Today we meet Jared Joiner, who has a very appropriate last name.
Jared: For the longest time I was like: What does this name even mean? And historically, it’s really about carpentry and joinery. But it was really as I was beginning to go into this work—and truthfully, it wasn’t until I watched JOIN OR DIE—when “being a joiner” and “joiners” kept coming up. I was like: Oh, maybe this is my calling!
Pete: A few years ago at a neighborhood event, Jared heard about a problem.
Jared: There’s a local nonprofit newspaper in Oakland called Oaklandside, and they have a quarterly event where they feature different speakers on different topics. There was a bar owner, a DJ, a musician that had come up in the Oakland hyphy scene. It was a panel, and the reporter was like, “Do you have any parting words for the audience?” And they said, “We need you all to come out. We need you all to come to our places”— because Oakland hasn’t really bounced back in the way that many other urban areas have since the pandemic.
And so that panel was the spark and I was like: Oh wait, this is something that I can do.
Rebecca: And this is when Jared decided to do something he could have done alone…together.
Jared: And so I just started gathering folks to go to bars that were struggling. Going into that December break, I started texting with one of my group chats and asking my friends: “Is this something that we should do? And what should we name it?” And I have a very creative friend who came up with the name Revival Rounds and it took off from there.
So I decided to launch it in January. I sent out an email to my coworkers to start, and then also just all of my friends and any listserv I was on. I was just trying to send it out far and wide—and I was shocked that folks were saying yes. And I think that’s the hardest part about hosting something or building community—it’s like when you throw a house party, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, is anyone gonna come? Is anyone gonna show up?”
And then when the first one showed up, I was like: Alright, we got a little bit of momentum. And then that just gave me the confidence to keep doing it and coming up with an idea for the next one.
Pete: For the first few months, Jared kept it very simple.
Jared: I was using just really rudimentary Google Calendar invites because I was still very work-oriented. And I think that some of the other tools like Partiful and Luma were not in existence at that time yet. So I truly just had a recurring event for the third Friday of every month going, and set that so people could hold it. I wanted to make it pretty predictable so that folks would know that something might happen.
And then choosing the bars was not fully planned and intentional, but I tried to have my ear to the streets about where places were struggling. The second place was one of these bars that I knew was having some struggles because they had had an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about their challenges.
One of the things about Revival Rounds—the initial impetus was I didn’t want it to just be a happy hour. So I was always trying to get the owners of the establishments to at least give a five-minute chat with the attendees just to say, “This is why I do this. This is what got me into it. This is how you can help us out.”
And it was probably the third or the fourth one, one of the owners just made this speech that stuck with me ever since. And he just said: “The best thing you can do is just be a regular—be a regular at a place.” That became our motto in those early years, trying to get people to understand that if you’re only going to a place once or twice a year, they’re gonna go under. But if you can give them a little bit of predictable support, and also through that you’re not just giving them revenue, but you also build community in those spaces.
And that’s one of the things that I’ve always loved about that really special pub or bar atmosphere—you get a really interesting set of characters that it’s hard to come across almost anywhere else.
Rebecca: Since then, Jared’s hosted over 20 Revival Rounds events.
Jared: We stuck with the third Friday of every month pretty consistently. But I think there was an interesting shift that happened probably about six months in. We went from just being a happy hour to kind of thinking about additional community building activities in there. We did wreath making, we did vision boarding. And now Revival Rounds is sort of this Civic Thursdays event that happens.
We have our third one coming up this week, which will be more about reflecting on what folks’ connection in different areas of their life look like in 2025 and what they want it to be in 2026. The event before that was one where we had an urban planner and designer who did this event to help folks think about the Oakland they want using building blocks and really tactile materials. And so I’d say that we’re actually getting even a little bit more deeper into what the civic world would be, even though we’re not quite on that same cadence as we were before.
Pete: And Revival Rounds has brought Jared into community with Oakland’s other community builders.
Jared: Revival Rounds has been an interesting way for me to actually learn more about what else is in the city. So for example, there’s this group called Friend Cult. They have a weekly dinner party for folks, but they have some culty iconography to make it feel like people are really part of something. But it’s really cool because we’ve become fellow travelers in this work of building community in Oakland.
And so I don’t know that I would’ve been able to have the same type of conversation about: Well, how do you make sure that folks are mingling? Or how do you help people to think about what they’re joining or being a member of? And rather than going to be entertained, how do we create this community feel in a civic way that’s both fun and gives folks a really easy on-ramp to civic action?
Rebecca: And Jared sees the future of this work as stewarding a platform where others can bring their ideas to the community too.
Jared: The most important goal for me is to try to do a bit more of co-hosting. The last event was neat because John and James, the facilitators of this “Tracks to Build To” event—they’ve done it elsewhere, sort of semi-professionally. And so this was the first event where I was like, oh, I am just creating the vehicle for this event to happen and co-planning it and co-designing it with someone else. I would love to do more of that.
So I’m trying to encourage attendees—if they have an idea for an event, I want to make sure that this is something that people don’t have to feel like it’s a really steep hill for them to run an event, and I can help them with that.
Pete: Jared’s brought it full circle, helping people take that same leap he once took.
Jared: I don’t know when we got conditioned that we have to have the full perfect plan and the logic model and everything to make an event happen. So I try to encourage folks: If they have an idea, if they want to do something, if they want to build something, if they want to create a community…just to try it or to do it.
I hear a lot of times folks are like, “Well, I wish I had someone to craft with,” or “I wish I had someone leading a book club.” And I’m always saying, Well, why don’t you start it? Why don’t you do it?—trying to encourage folks to take that initiative. It was a really hard realization: No one is gonna build this for me. No one’s going to be looking out for these bars or these gathering spaces. And so why not me? Why can’t I be the person to take that first step?
Next up for Jared? He’s planning a two-day civic weekend, where he’ll be screening JOIN OR DIE, and hosting The Oakland Join-Up Activity Fair, which will give Oakland residents a chance to meet 20+ local clubs, community groups, mutual aid projects, arts collectives, and civic initiatives.
💡 Learn more
⇛ Read more from Jared about Revival Rounds and see photos from past events here
⇛ Learn about The Oakland Join-Up and other projects Jared is working on here
⇛ Follow the latest from Jared on his Substack (we especially love this post he did on the importance of clubhouses!)
🍿 Bring JOIN OR DIE to your community
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📣 Spread the message
Know someone who’d be moved to action by Jared’s story?
Inspired by someone who you think we should feature in a future WAYDATYCBDT who chose do something that they could have done alone…together? Comment below!
