Looking Back at "The Art of Association," 2020-2024
A Note on the Archive
I started blogging at “The Art of Association” during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic. You can read more about my initial intention in the first post, “Welcome to ‘The Art of Association’” (May 15, 2020), as well as a subsequent and deeper reflection about what really prompted me in “After the Pandemic: Loneliness, Belonging, and Rebuilding our Civic Infrastructure” (June 15, 2023).
For the first 4.5 years of the blog, from May 2020 through December 2024, I hosted it on a Squarespace website I developed and used to share my posts more or less monthly via email. The mounting time and expense involved in operating the website and distributing the posts to (by this point) 900 subscribers, some with quite voracious spam filters, eventually brought me and and this blog over to Substack.
Not wanting to leave all my old posts behind, I have manually imported not quite half of them for the years 2020-2024 to the archive here, keeping the original content and dates of posting. I used two criteria in selecting which posts to bring over : (1) their content is evergreen and not pegged to past events; and (2) they ranked in the top half of posts on the original site in terms of reader visits and engagement.
In the future, I may send some of these archived posts to out to Substack subscribers via newsletters. But for now, I have simply published them on my homepage, where they will be joined in the archive by new posts from January 2025 forward.
The goal of the blog remains the same: to inform and inspire nonprofit leaders, advocates, researchers, policymakers, philanthropists, their advisors, and (not least) everyday citizens working for a civic renewal. In light of this goal, both the “historical” archive and all forthcoming posts will remain free to all readers.
With this curated set of deep cuts from 2020-2024, my hope is that those new to the blog can discover, and long-timers can rediscover, content that is relevant and helpful for their work. If and when you find that it is, I would be much obliged if you could share it with others in your networks. There is a “share” tab at the bottom of each post to help you do so.
Thanks for reading, and more soon!
Daniel
Don't remember when or how I first discovered your work on the original site but it was I think sometime in 2023 -- have appreciated each of essays and look forward to continuing to be an avid reader!