Monica Dugo moved from Arlington, Virginia to East Passyunk last March. She had a new remote job, had visited Philly and liked it, and figured: Why not? Arlington was fine, but expensive. Dugo, a self-proclaimed nomad, had lived and worked in Buenos Aires, Boston, France and the country of Georgia, among other places. This time, she was looking for a city where she didn’t have to drive to hang out with friends. The only trouble: She didn’t really know anyone here.

Lucky for her, she’d met Philadelphian Brian Adoff, the founder of Join Philly, an organization he created last year to help people just like Dugo. In April, she and about 2,300 others took part in Join Philly’s one-day activities fair at the Ethical Society. There, Dugo signed herself up for the Fishtown Beer Runners and Philly Cooks A Book, two of about 45 organizations in attendance. She has since begun to find her people.

“I’ve never had such a great welcome,” she says. For the first time in her life, Dugo has bought furniture, setting down roots — and becoming somewhat of a Philly evangelist.

“It’s such an underrated city,” she says. “Everyone seems to be very nice here.”Adoff’s group’s mission is to build connections. In doing so, he’s helping to keep Philadelphians in Philly, a city for decades plagued by urban flight, by showing them they belong here.

An inventor and convener

If Adoff’s name sounds familiar, it might be because of some of his other connection-building creations. In 2023, the energetic, enthusiastic and voluble South Jersey native and Fishtown resident founded the Fishtown Choir, “just because I wanted to be a lounge singer, but I’m not very good, so I created this whole thing just so I could sing at people,” he says.

After he saw the film, “Join or Die,” the documentary on social scientist Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone who posited that American civic life was dying because of a lack of social connection, leading to isolation and political divisions, Adoff “thought, geez, I better start something to do with clubs,” he says in an email. He started inviting folks to punk rock shows, among other DIY projects.

Last year, he took his passion full-time, leaving a job at a software company and launching the “experience design and cultural strategy” studio Architects of Human Connection. This year, he added Join Philly to his creations. And this month, he and his studio will debut the Museum of the Philadelphian, “an unapologetic micromuseum about Philadelphia’s people” on September 25. The Fishtown museum will feature such iconic Philly exhibits as “the demise of a hitchhiking robot.”

Adoff calls Join Philly an “on-ramp” to civic and community life and that people do want to get involved in clubs — they just need help connecting with them. He also calls social connection “the stickiest variable that helps people stay.”

An idea he didn’t steal, but he didn’t invent wholesale either

Join Philly is somewhat unique to Philadelphia, but it’s not unique in the world. From Oakland, California, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, community activists are creating grassroots efforts to deepen social connections among new and old residents. The national organization the Chamber of Connection, which has opened chapters in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Seattle, San Diego, and the Bay Area, sees its mission as laying the foundation for social infrastructure.

These organizations have been created out of a sense, backed up by various reports, including the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 report on our country’s “epidemic of loneliness,” that people are spending too much time alone and are suffering for it. One of the major ironies of our era is that while information is widely accessible, finding the right information, whether it’s about clubs or civic organizations, remains difficult.

Sites like Meetup.com or Eventbrite are OK, but don’t feel especially local or personal. Join Philly brings a localized lens to the same problem, but offers a more direct solution with an online directory and live events, supporting people who are finding it difficult to identify their tribes. It’s a social connection platform for and by Philadelphians.

Join … and live

Join Philly is volunteer-run and has no major outside funding. April’s activities fair featured civic groups, clubs, government agencies, and community organizations, representing the wide diversity of interests in Philadelphia: Invest for Better Philadelphia, for women to connect and learn how to support causes they care about; Philly Cooks A Book, a social club where members share the same recipe each month; and many others.

The organizers of let me know club, described as “where crafting and connection meet,” were surprised by an “overwhelming” response at the fair. The group organizes a variety of social events focused on collaging, stitching, and friendship. At the activities fair, they organized multiple “platonic love club” sessions — basically speed friending, where strangers meet in rotating 5-minute sprints.

All 18 spaces for let me know’s meet-up within the meet-up were filled, says Club President Rebecca Werez, 28, of South Philadelphia. “People in the city are kind of looking for community and friendship right now. It was really fun,” she says. “At the very end we had people swapping numbers.”

Werez says her own life transition in 2024 led her to seek out the let me know club. “I was really looking for community because I was going through a really awful friend breakup,” she says. “Because of that, I had trouble making friends.”

She says that the club was “born of a need and craving for community and also a space for adults to relax and unwind.” As the head baker at Vibrant Coffee and Bakery in Rittenhouse, she usually wakes at 4am to get to work and can clock in at least 50 hours a week. She says her peers are also working long hours to make ends meet, with less time to invest in finding friends. “People struggle with this hustle culture.”

Join Philly can do only so much

There’s no Eagles-green welcome mat in Philadelphia. No City department or nonprofit is tasked with making sure that social connection flourishes. Philly’s best-known welcoming organizations mostly cater to visitors. This year, however, one built connections among locals too.

Although the Philadelphia Visitor Center’s mission is to serve tourists, President and CEO Kathryn Ott Lovell says it fostered friendships with the Phambassadors program the Visitor Center launched in 2025. Designed to encourage residents to welcome visitors during the World Cup and other 2026 events, the program — which attracted 10,000 locals as of this July — became “a vehicle for people’s passion for Philly and to build civic pride,” says Ott Lovell.

Anyone who loves Philly could become a Phambassador, who participated in events like Pham Camps and happy hours. The program wasn’t intended to unite Philadelphians, but it has. Still, says Ott Lovell, “We are in desperate need of opportunities to bring us together.”

In desperate need for more Adoffs, who fairly bubbles with ideas for Join Philly. He’d love to offer microgrants or leadership workshops through the organization. In addition to the fair, he wouldn’t mind creating some sort of welcome kit for new residents, like an onboarding for the city, much like colleges offer to freshmen. He’s also thinking about how he can support club organizers who are mostly volunteers. “People aren’t getting paid,” for that work, he says. “People burn out. We need those clubs to keep existing.”

STORIES ABOUT CONNECTING IN PHILLY