Caitlin Squier-Roper, 45, recently discovered an intriguing club on Instagram: Philly Cooks a Book, a monthly meetup where locals prepare and share an assigned recipe from a specified cookbook. She could’ve enrolled through the group’s social media and shown up to a meeting, dish in hand, not knowing a single soul. So she held off on joining.

It wasn’t until Squier-Roper and her husband Anthony Fernandez, 42, attended the Philadelphia Activities Fair that she decided to get involved. Squier-Roper and Fernandez recently moved to Philadelphia after living in Seattle for over a decade and didn’t have a network in their new city beyond their families. When they heard about the Activities Fair, a one-day exhibition of clubs, civic groups, and community organizations enrolling new members, the couple thought it the perfect opportunity to spread their social wings.

Thousands of other people had the same idea.

On a Sunday in April, around 2,300 attendees crowded every inch of available space in a historic downtown civic center to discover, and potentially sign up, for a club. Outside, it was the perfect kind of spring day: abundant sunshine, a light breeze, giving way for the serendipitous pop-ins from curious passersby. Inside, spectators shuffled, shoulder to shoulder, in single-file lines up and down the building’s winding staircase and through two rooms of tables representing more than 40 clubs, including a community for Black artists, a book club but for podcasts, and an a cappella group, stopping to chat with organization leaders and join their ranks. It was in one of these glacial plods around the ground floor of the event space when I met Squier-Roper and Fernandez. They’d already signed up for the cookbook club, the a cappella choir, and a cycling group.

The event itself, structured as it was, was novel for the couple and Squier-Roper said she was nervous to attend. “It seems out of the box and vulnerable,” she told me. But, looking around the room, she was in good company. “It’s helpful to see how many other people are here in the same searching situation,” she said. “It’s pretty cool.”

If Squier-Roper and Fernandez have felt socially adrift as of late, they certainly are not alone. The 2025 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey found that about half of US adults reported feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship at least some of the time. According to Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project’s 2024 survey, 21 percent of respondents said they were seriously lonely, over two thirds of whom felt like they lacked belonging in meaningful groups.

Although many Americans say they’re lonely, and perhaps have become more aware of its negative impacts, they don’t seem to be prioritizing activities that foster connection. According to the American Time Use Survey, people spent nearly half of their waking time — more than six-and-a-half-hours — alone in 2024, compared to just under five hours in 2003. Young people spent 45 percent more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2010. What are we doing with all this time in solitude? Watching TV, staring at our phones, gaming, mostly.

Against this backdrop, a crop of community-minded organizers stumbled into a similar train of thought: People are disconnected (perhaps I am one of these people). My city has a treasure trove of hobby clubs and civic organizations. If I lead a horse to water, can I get it to drink? From this seed of an idea, a genre of connectedness events was born — the activity fair, stuff to do fair, joining fair. From Philadelphia to Oakland, a wave of well-attended one-day activity fairs are the latest grassroots efforts to combat loneliness and connect people to their communities. These festivals operate under a simple premise: getting people in a room with club representatives is more effective and less overwhelming than scouring the internet, and it lowers the barrier to entry.

“If there are things to join, people will join them,” Pete Davis, co-director of the documentary Join or Die, told me. But first they have to find them.

But participation in these groups has declined, as political scientist Robert Putnam famously explained in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, first published in 2000. Putnam found that enrollment in clubs of all kinds had dropped since the 1960s. Conditions have seemingly not improved. The inaugural Social Connection in America report, released last year, found that two-thirds of participants don’t belong to or never attend a meeting of any sort of organization or club. A 2024 survey from the Survey Center on American Life found that fewer than two in 10 Americans were members of hobby or activity groups, neighborhood associations, sports leagues, or parent groups.

The regularity with which you meet makes clubs effective friendship-builders: If you see someone frequently enough, it’s easier to forge a relationship with them. Even if full-fledged friendship isn’t the goal, simply making acquaintances is sufficient to stave off loneliness and foster a sense of belonging. As Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, “As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.”

Activity fairs are the natural next step in bridging the gap between the crop of niche and hyper-local clubs and a curious, but overwhelmed, populace. The concept is no different than welcome week activities at college campuses where a quorum of university clubs table and recruit new members. Designed to reach members of the wider community, club fairs operate as a live directory of a city’s offerings, all under one roof. “There’s no shortage of Instagram accounts and apps of things to do, concerts, events,” Brian Adoff, the founder of Join Philly, the group that organized the Philadelphia Activities Fair, told me. “And people still can’t find stuff.”

Adoff has long understood the benefits of clubs. In 2023, he and a friend founded a choir, bringing strangers of all ages to bars for impromptu concerts. Many attendees, he noticed, were attending solo, new to the city, or both, and formed friendships from the group. But it wasn’t until he attended a screening of Join or Die, a 2023 documentary extolling the benefits of joining clubs, compounding on Putnam’s work, that Adoff thought, I want to do this.

When I checked in with Adoff at the Philadelphia Activities Fair, he was standing on a stage overlooking the ground floor of the event, getting a good glimpse of the hundreds of locals learning about the dozens of clubs he’d brought there.

Join Philly initially began as an online directory of clubs and associations, and the issue wasn’t finding clubs to showcase — there were plenty of those. It was getting people to participate. Sure, locals could scour the internet for a hobby group, but what if they weren’t even sure what to search for? What if they’re a little shy and walking into a room full of people they don’t know makes their stomach turn? Putting the club-curious in the same room as the groups solved some of these issues, a concept Adoff refers to as a participatory “on-ramp.” “That was the first on-ramp,” Adoff said. “How do we make this easier?”

C.C. Tellez, 48, the executive director of Lez Run, an LGBTQ+ running club, found this direct approach effective at quelling prospective members’ concerns. “Online, people like the idea of something, but they’re afraid to take the first step,” Tellez told me over the thrum of the Philadelphia Activities Fair. Tellez was approached in person by people who follow Lez Run on Instagram but were concerned about the pace, about being new. “We let them know we welcome everybody: different paces, different setups, whatever you’ve got going on, we welcome it here,” Tellez said.

I first became aware of activity fairs in 2025, when I learned of one happening in Lancaster, a small Pennsylvania city not far from Philadelphia. Hundreds of people crowded into a community center in the middle of winter to learn about a brewing club, rugby team, a mechanical keyboard club.

The event’s organizer, Sav Thorpe Capizzi, had a lightbulb moment after a friend invited her square dancing a few years ago, something she’d never done before. As she do-si-do-ed with strangers, Capizzi wasn’t worried about how she looked or her skill (or lack thereof). “I just felt so alive in that moment and I was just so grateful to the part of me that just said yes to potentially looking a little foolish,” she told me. “And I was like, ‘Okay, so I need to invite everybody I know to every club I can think of right now.’”

Unaware of any other event geared specifically toward adults, Capizzi sent an email first to the town library, then a guild of crafters, and eventually cobbled together a list of exhibitors. She dubbed her version the Stuff to Do Fair and from that initial event sprung an offshoot in a smaller Pennsylvania town and, also the more robust second-annual Lancaster Stuff to Do Fair. This year, Capizzi doubled the amount of exhibiting clubs to 50 and nearly 600 people attended, she said.

In Capizzi’s estimation, fear of being bad at something is the biggest barrier to entry for any potential new club attendee — feeling like you’re not the kind of person who has the body for roller derby or the wit for improv comedy. Activity fairs give the shy, the uncertain, the hesitant permission to imagine themselves as someone who does. “There’s this air of novelty of all of the versions of you that exist at each of these tables,” she said. “It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, and I think it really gives people the opportunity to see themselves actually becoming the kind of person who enrolls in a class or takes up sketching after so many years.”

The Stuff to Do Fair, as well as the Philadelphia Activities Fair and the other club fairs I came across in my reporting, were organized by individuals, and perhaps that’s part of their charm. They’re scrappy and community-driven. But it’s easy to imagine a world in which these events might be sanctioned by local governments to promote public health. Social prescribing, a practice where patients receive a script not for pills but attendance at a community group, has gained momentum around the world, with medical professionals connecting patients to cycling clubs, performing arts groups, or volunteer organizations. Recent research has found social prescribing in the United Kingdom, where it was first developed, has led to improvements in wellbeing, happiness, and life satisfaction.

In place of a medical professional linking individuals to groups and activities that might benefit their mental or physical health, there could be activity fairs. “In other countries where we have more government support for social prescribing programs, what that government support goes to are up-to-date databases of the different activities that exist,” Hotz, the author of The Connection Cure, told me. If online listings and databases are out of date, well-intentioned would-be participants could be easily deterred, however motivated they might be. Solely relying on the internet to disseminate cub information means those with unreliable access or who aren’t tech-savvy are shut out from opportunities, too.

“An activity fair, giving you the information in real time and letting you meet with the people part of it in real time, I think just goes such a long way in making sure that your interest becomes a reality,” Hotz said.

Social prescribing gives people permission to do something meaningful, and to be convivial in the process. And so do activity fairs. “What a joining fair is is answering the question, What are you doing alone that you could be doing together? by having a cooperative recruiting event,” said Pete Davis, one of the directors of Join or Die.

In addition to a traditional screening tour, Davis, and his co-director and sister Rebecca (who was a supervising producer for the second season of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained) helped dozens of community organizers across the country host their own joining fairs in order to promote their film. But even if event planners didn’t work with the Davises directly, their documentary served as a point of inspiration.

Like Adoff in Philadelphia, Jared Joiner watched the Davises’ documentary, and it set the wheels in motion for his own fair in Oakland. That his actual last name is Joiner is not lost on him. “I had not thought about it in this world of joining clubs and joining organizations until the first time that I watched Join or Die and they say ‘joiner’ so many times in it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, am I destined to do this work?’” he told me.

The same day that thousands of Philadelphians signed up for clubs at Join Philly, Oakland hosted its first Join-Up at a brewery in the midst of torrential downpours. Although the event had a smaller footprint — about 250 attendees and 22 organizations — many club representatives told Joiner they ran out of sign-up sheets.

There’s something to be said about the kind of person who attends an activity fair. “There’s definitely a self-selecting group that’s like, ‘I’m going to get off the couch to go to this thing, so I better sign up for stuff once I’m there,’” Joiner says. But there are a myriad of motivating factors getting those people off the couch in the first place: a recent move, a loss, a birth, a new job, a desire to unplug, to learn a new skill.

The consequence, deliberate or not, is the forging of new social connections. When our worlds shrink to the confines of our homes and our screens, intentionally exposing ourselves to newfound (or newly rediscovered) activities and new people helps broaden them again. Clubs, with their regular, predetermined cadence and specific focus, are the ideal entry points to connection: Striking up a conversation is simple when you already have something in common — the activity itself.

Toward the end of my afternoon at the Philadelphia Activities Fair, I ran into Deborah Winter and Terry Borden, both 71, as they finished a lap on the first floor of the exhibition. Winter is moving to Philly soon, and although Borden has been a resident for two decades, they both are still on that never-ending path toward community. “It’s hard to find your people,” Borden told me.

Through clubs they signed up for — a book club, a skill-share — they hope to find both friendships and more casual relationships, something they’re already practicing. As it turns out, the two women are new friends themselves, recently introduced by a mutual.

Even if they didn’t branch out at any of their new groups, I thought, at least they could reminisce, some day in the future, about this event, about the time they went out on a limb and joined a few clubs. Maybe the groups were boring or not quite the right fit, maybe they weren’t. But they tried something unfamiliar, together, and that’s something.