Building to Last
By Quinn · 18 October 2026
At Polyday 2026 I ran a workshop entitled “Building to Last”, which began with a presentation about Yorkshire O.P.E.N and the steps we’ve taken to ensure that our group survives and continues to be an inclusive, self-supporting and diverse community for so many years.
This blog post is a look at the core ideas from that presentation, shared here in the hope that they will help other organizers looking to get their groups to last the test of time.
Our group has been going since February 2012 - at the time of writing almost 15 years! It’s not the longest-running non-monogamy group in the country but I think it’s one of the top 3, and it’s it’s been going 10 years longer than that US organisation with the same name!
Contents
Our goals for endurance
Every group will have its own goals - what “success” looks like for them. I realised when putting this presentation together that these are ours - they’ve endured since the very beginning but this was the first time I actually wrote them down like this.
1. Make it as safe as possible
No group is completely safe, but prioritising safety over all else is really the most important thing to us.
2. Ensure people see themselves
If someone walks into a group and the only people talking are the white, beer-drinking, straight-ish men, they might not see themselves reflected in this community and it might be difficult for them to stick around and have fun.
3. Keep the community alive
We meet once a month. But we have always wanted to keep the community alive in various ways between events - it’s a community, not a recurring meeting.
4. Welcome new people, scare off creepy people
A long-lasting community can be scary to new people, so we have many initiatives to ensure new people feel welcome. Unless they’re the creepy dudes who are hoping to attend primarily to hit on hot non-monogamous women. We don’t want them.
What we’ve found works
The rest of this post details eight of the very practical things we’ve done over the years that we’ve found worked in the service on those four goals.
We’ve tried many other things over the years, but these ones are the ones that have really stuck for us.
1. Stick with it
I have seen many groups born and faded away over the years. If I was to name one factor that’s more common than any other in the death of a group, it’s “life gets in the way”.
Sometimes your group has quiet months. Sometimes it has months when the last thing you want to do is go out and run an event. Sometimes you are just too damned busy to make the group happen.
But groups can only survive with someone to lead them. Once you have a community, lean on them. Bring more people on board. Have backups to your backups.
If you want your group to survive, you might have to treat it as a thing that is too important to die.
2. Rules
Most groups have ground rules, but rules are only good if they’re useful… and enforced.
These are our rules. I’m not suggesting every group should have an exact copy of these rules, but these are the ones that work for our group:
- Please respect the privacy of other members and keep the discussion confidential within the group.
- Please remember that this is a public group and anyone could secretly be a reporter or a spy from your mum. Don’t say anything that would cause you major problems if it became public knowledge.
- Don’t try to force anyone to speak, and please remember that if you’re talking for a long time, people might not get a chance to speak. Please help the organisers if they’ve not spotted that someone is trying to speak.
- [At online meetups:] Don’t send private messages to people if you don’t know them. This is a group discussion and unexpected private messages can be uncomfortable.
- Remember that your version of ethical non-monogamy is only one kind, and respect that other people’s may be different to yours. Also please respect that monogamy is an equally valid lifestyle.
- Just because someone is talking a lot doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
- Please take pronouns seriously.
- We take donations to cover the cost of the room, but please don’t feel like you have to donate.
Enforcing them with kindness
When someone breaks one of our rules, we swoop into action. No delays while we psych ourselves up to deal with a problem element. We have to talk to the person who broke the rule quickly so that everyone feels protected by them.
But enforcing rules has to be done kindly. In all these years, the vast majority of times someone has broken the rules it’s been a mistake… someone was careless or not really understanding the vibe of the group and said or did something inappropriate. Something being unintentional doesn’t make it any less harmful, and we enforce the rules whether the harm was intended or not, but there’s no reason we can’t be kind as we do it.
We make sure that we talk to that person privately about what has happened and why it’s important to us - and our community - that they don’t do that.
Crucially, we remind them that the community is there to support them and not just the person who was harmed by their rule-breakage. We don’t evict people from the group if they show a willingness to understand the rules and adapt their behaviour, but we also don’t hesitate to evict people who show no remorse or continue to break rules after this conversation.
There are times when it makes sense to demonstrate action, to call people out in front of other members, but I find these are extremely rare and almost always not the right option. The times I’d do it were if a conversation had completely derailed and many people were getting involved with it: something that used to happen when we were on Facebook but we haven’t seen in many years.
Revising them
Rules need revising too. Ours have changed a fair bit over the years, usually in response to people doing inappropriate things that weren’t covered by the rules, or because they’ve become obsolete through changes in wider society.
One of the ways we revise our rules is through the members’ survey, discussed later in this post.
3. Structure
Structure is great for new people. Most people are terrified of bringing their relationship problems to a group that knows each other, and creating some structure to an event helps people to know that their voice is going to be heard, if they want it to be, and that they don’t have to work out all the norms of the group by themself.
This gets even more important as a group goes on longer, because the longer a group exists, the more it will feel to new people like they are coming into somewhere that already has its own cliques and customs.
Structure is also great for some neurodivergent people, including myself. I hate nothing more than being invited to a thing and not having all the details. More info is always better than less - people can always ignore the “further reading” parts if they just want to wing it. Relatedly, our co-organizer Emily did a talk at a different conference about lengthy party invites.
Thinking Environment
I’m a huge fan of Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment, which is a set of tools designed for workplaces and groups to give people the chance to do their best thinking.
Nancy Kline is an educator who discovered through research that the biggest thing that got in the way of people’s thinking was other people not paying attention. She devised this environment of Ten Components which, when held, give people the highest chance of being able to think clearly. It sounds a bit woo and magical until you try it and then you instantly feel the results yourself.
We don’t use the whole of Thinking Environment at O.P.E.N because we don’t want to put every new member through a training course, but we do use one of its simplest applications: the Thinking Round.
Thinking Round
The Thinking Round gives each person present one turn to do their thinking about a specific question. When it’s your turn, you have as long as you like to think about the question. You can think out loud, you can think in silence, you can share your thoughts in a way others will understand, or you can just ramble away. Crucially, the time is yours: no one can interrupt you, stop you or ask any questions, and they are meant to all give you their full, undivided attention.
Because there is no rushing to get your words in or hoping you’ll get a turn, no one has to think about their own answer to the question until it is their turn to think.
We always ask the same question: “What’s on your mind about relationships?” but it can be any question. Thinking Environment uses “What’s your freshest thinking?” as a kind of default question for this topic.
If you are meeting in person, it’s easy to determine the turn order by just picking someone to go first and then going round the room. Online, we mute everyone and then send an “unmute request” to attendees in turn, asking them to mute when they are done thinking.
Follow along on the website
There’s a lot of “talk” at a support group and sometimes it can be hard to follow what’s being said. So we have a website where we list how an event will go, what the rules are, how to donate and so on and so on. Putting links in the chat, or QR codes in the room, can help people to follow along with the written version of what’s being said.
4. Same time, same place
Having an event happen at a reliable time can help busy people to plan it into their lives. And who has busier calendars than us non-monogamous people?
O.P.E.N has been meeting at 7pm on the first Thursday of the month every single month since February 2012.
Some of these have been socials — especially in December when we have our Christmas party — and one month in 2019 I somehow did my back in on the way to the venue and had to go to an emergency doctor. But those who attended still had a great time in the pub without me!
Now that we have our main support group online, we keep the technology and the link the same wherever possible.
Moving online during the early days of the pandemic was revelatory to us. Having a support group online has three major benefits that we never want to go back from:
- We don’t have to book a venue, or get ready and go out on days when we really can’t be bothered
- It’s way more accessible to disabled members, distant members and parents
- Creepy men apparently hate online groups — I guess because it’s hard for them to cruise the room and look for people to have flirty side conversations with
Discord is the winner for online space
We’ve tried so many different technologies to keep the conversation going in between our main support events.
First we were on a self-hosted forum. That worked well for older IT nerds like me but anyone born in the 90s or later is going to feel like they’re interacting with dinosaurs.
Then we moved to Facebook which worked OK but ended up concentrating the conversation amongst a few very active people, as well as alienating everyone who is permanently off Facebook.
But we struck gold with Discord. It’s not perfect by any means, but having the combination of live text chat channels, forum channels for more serious support threads, and easy ways to separate fun from seriousness as well as the very “closed” and “exclusive” feeling of it seems to be the right combination.
If you’re very technically minded, it can be tempting to choose a more open and encrypted service like Matrix, but these have such a high barrier to entry that will tend to put off members who are less technical. Discord is still too technical or novel for some people, but the barrier to entry is quite low.
Not all our members are active on Discord, but we’ve had much more success engaging a much larger crowd on there than we ever did on our earlier attempts.
5. “Members only” (and what this actually means)
Our Discord, and also some events such as our Christmas party, are “members only”.
We don’t have a membership scheme of any sort — someone automatically becomes a member when we meet them for the first time.
This ensures that our membership is wide, and open to all, but it’s also not a complete free-for-all. Our Discord is made up of people who actively wanted to engage us in a conversation at least once, not just perpetually-online internet trolls. I think this sets us apart from other online spaces, because it keeps the conversation small and generally amongst people who have a desire to actively know each other for real.
What it doesn’t do is increase our safety much. Since the bar for entry is very low, we still end up with all kinds of people in our Discord. In reality, this little barrier has probably contributed to the low number of incidents we’ve had over the years, but I wanted to highlight this point in case anyone reading this was thinking this is a way to keep the bad guys out.
6. Modelling diversity and inclusion
Having a structure is a good way to increase diversity and inclusion. The Thinking Round ensures that everyone gets heard and makes it less likely that people from an underrepresented group will attend, feel left out and then leave and never come back.
The other factor here is time. We haven’t done anything specific to increase numbers of marginalised members, but once we have one or two regular members from an underrespresented group, then new people joining will feel more like this is a space for them. Last time we surveyed our members we were massively over-indexed on LGBTQ+ but more importantly we were quite representative of the wider population for race, religion, disability, parenthood and so on.
Being “very gay”
I said we are overindexed on LGBTQ+ members and I think that’s because of our stance that we’re “very gay”. Our two hosts are both visibly queer and one (hello) is visibly trans. We are careful to ask for pronouns, and our logo has been — since the start — a rainbow infinity heart.
Being “very gay” seems like a good way to keep problem elements away. In our experience, most of the problem elements in our community are also straight cis people - usually men.
The same people who cause problems for us seem more put off by loud gayness, so it serves both to include LGBTQ+ people and self-select the problem straight people out.
Non-problematic straight people still feel welcome, because they are not scared of gay people!
Working hard to include new people
One of the big challenges with a long-running group is that new people feel like they’re walking into a group of people who are already friends. We can’t take the welcoming nature of our group for granted and put extra effort into welcoming new people.
At the event itself we make a special effort to talk to new people who arrive during gathering time, and letting them know it’s OK to have their camera off if they want. We also let people know that if they want to speak anonymously they can DM us with the message they want us to read.
We also meet new people who are nervous about attending and give them a chance for a one-on-one meetup ahead of their first group event. It’s a lot of work for us to do, but it doesn’t need to happen that often so we’re happy to do it for the people who need it.
Encouraging friendships rather than dating
The third way we prioritise inclusion is by making sure people know we are not a dating group. We encourage people to form friendships within our community and sometimes these friendships naturally turn into romance, but we explicitly tell people that if their main reason for coming is to meet people to date, then it’s not the group for them.
7. Different people for different hats
Running a group is hard, so we have enlisted many volunteers to help.
We have one person who leads on socials, one person who leads on providing links in the chat and running the after-party, people who highlight bad behaviour to us, and so on.
Often these roles are self-selecting and we encourage people who want to step up and help, even if they do say they want me and Emily to be in charge overall.
8. Annual survey
Finally, we want members to feel they have a say in how O.P.E.N is run. Every year, or as often as we can, we survey all our members on things like:
- Whether the rules need to change
- Whether they’re happy with the current arrangement of meeting online
- Whether they’re happy with the “benevolent dictatorship”
- Whether they want to get involved
- Their demographics
And then we publish the results, along with an action plan for what we’re going to change as a response to it.
This is a big piece of work and we don’t get to it every year, but it really helps us to ensure that everyone has a say in how the group runs and that people are getting what they need out of it.
Here’s the form for our survey from 2023, if you’d like to crib any of it.
What O.P.E.N looks like after all these years
Yorkshire O.P.E.N is a thriving community - we have between 12 and 30 people at every event and some people describe it as their happy place - coming even when they’re completely burnt out and unable to do any other social activity. Our membership is 70% LGBTQ+ and very diverse in other ways. And there are numerous real friendship groups that have formed and endured as a consequence of our group.
I’m more proud of this community than I am of anything else I’ve ever done in my life and I hope it continues to endure for all time!
If you’d like to talk to me or any of our other organizers about your group and any other challenges you might be having, we’d love to hear from you.