What does ‘Community’ mean to you?

Leading up to this year’s International Day of Friendship, we were having the chats in HQ about what friendship is (consensus: it’s hard to define exactly but whatever the definition, it’s great and we are overwhelmingly for friendship in concept and actuality). That then got us onto ‘community’ and what that is. How it’s different from friendship, what it means by definition, what it means in practice, what community means here at Gym+Coffee but most specifically, what we imagine community means to our, er, community!

As we dug into the friendship side of this convo, we figured friendship takes a lot of different forms but can really be distilled into a shared connection with another person. As it turns out, for us, Community runs a similar path: it’s all about connection, gaining a sense of belonging, being involved yourself and facilitating the involvement of others.

Our aim with G+C is to offer fun things to do, a rad crew to do things with and quality gear to do things in. Sometimes it can be tough taking that first step into a new space, but we promise, the more you get involved, the more your actions will encourage others to get involved, and the bigger your community will grow. The basic lesson: don’t let unnecessary things become a barrier to your own involvement, you’ll likely miss out on a whole lotta fun times.

You guys are pretty excellent at the ‘getting involved’ part and, we think we have a pretty good handle on what you guys look for in a community (you make up ours so that’s a good start). But we’d like to do a little less imagining and do a little more knowing. We'd love to hear directly from you, what COMMUNITY actually means to ya! Is the definition narrow or broad? Is it mostly about people or does location have a lot to do with it? Do you choose it? Are you born into it? Is it a little column A, a little column B?

TELL US EVERYTHING! Get online, on social, in-store, whatever! And let us know all about your community and what it/they mean to you. We’ll be spending a bunch more time over

“I know it is wet and the sun is not sunny but we can have lots of good fun that is funny.”

Dr. Seuss