Introducing Dadurdays: irl meetups coming to a city near you
"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men."
If you’ve arrived here from somewhere else, you should almost certainly sign up for the newsletter. There’s only one a week, and thousands of dads call this “the best email I get all week.”
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
– Herman Melville
Last week, an intense storm raged across Spain’s Eastern coast. A cold drop saw areas in the province of Valencia overwhelmed, six months of rain hammering down in under three hours. Chiva, a town 30 kilometres inland from Valencia, saw 491 millimetres of rain over eight hours. That’s 19 of your old-world inches. During Hurricane Katrina, the worst-hit areas of New Orleans didn’t see more than 13 inches across 48 hours.
Spain is reeling. This weekend saw three days of national mourning and thousands of volunteers descending upon Valencia with mops, buckets, and bin bags in hand. Emergency services asked them to stay away—for now—and find ways to help from afar. Others heard the call: Carles, a close friend here, messaged fellow restaurant owners, and they quickly kicked off a fundraiser for the World Kitchen. They have already brought in almost €10,000 to enable local residents to access food and clean water.1 Our local coffee shop announced on Tuesday morning that it would be operating as a collection point for donations of basic necessities. It was overflowing by the afternoon, a large truck arriving soon after, before making similar pickups across the city and heading southwest.
“What can we do?” is a question these people asked. It’s a common refrain in times of turmoil. It could be a natural disaster. It could be something half your country voted for. Around 60% of folks reading this newsletter are from the US. All viewpoints are welcome here, but even if I used the popular vote as a proxy (which I’m fairly confident won’t be an accurate ratio for TNF readers) that leaves at least 6,000 of you reeling from Wednesday’s events.
This year had already been a rough one, and I’ve sadly needed to reacquaint myself with When Things Fall Apart, and its perennial lessons:
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
This passage transports me to my parents’ house and the memory of reading it to my mum, sitting on the side of her bed, scant days before I’d say goodbye to her for the final time. When things fall apart, life offers a chance to work on an essential skill: identifying and focusing on what is in your control, whilst letting whatever falls outside leave your orbit. Or as Neil, a dad in the Dadscord said this week, "Time to tend the part of the garden I can touch.”
This week, I’m doing the same
“No one is useless in this world,” Charles Darwin wrote, “who lightens the burdens of another.” If you follow the branches of this newsletter back through trunk and roots, the original burden I’ve been obsessed with—since day one of my writing and a core thread in the four years since—is how hard it is to be a dad without a support network. Fatherhood is an isolating experience. Call it what you want: the male loneliness epidemic, the fatherhood friendship recession—data shows that men feel disconnected from their local communities, friends and family, and this drives adverse paternal mental health and increases undesirable outcomes. I felt it first-hand: 2019, moving to a new city, becoming a dad again, floored by an unexpected bout with paternal post-natal depression. I see it in my inbox every week. I see it in the dads seeking help through the therapy fund. We need each other, but we’re not doing the best job of showing up.
The support structures need to be there. The Dadscord, the online events, the men’s circles we’ve been doing—they work. But as great as connecting a disparate group of dads across the world can be, nothing beats talking to other dads in real life. A few months back, I got in touch with Chris, Johnny and John-Paul at Selman Design. I asked if they were interested in helping me figure out how we might make this happen. I shared what I’d been thinking:
Being a dad isn’t easy.
We’re expected to do more, and be more, than any generation of dads that came before us.
Be the rock of the family. Be more vulnerable. Be successful. Be ever-present.
It ends up feeling like you’re doing a terrible job of everything.
We know mums don’t have it any easier. Many of our battles today, they’ve been fighting for decades—if not centuries! But mums have one thing that we don’t. They have each other: Check-ins. Texts. Calls. Coffee. Mums talk to other mums. They share their struggles. They look out for one another, building support networks to shield and lift each other up during life’s biggest transitions.
Us dads? We need more of that. That’s why I started The New Fatherhood. It’s dads looking out for other dads. And that’s why we’re making these local groups. Because there are dads in your city who believe all of this and are looking for others who feel the same.
I wrote one word in the subject line: Dadurdays. I’d seen someone talking about it on TikTok—one day a week when dad takes the reins, mum can take the day off, and we can take charge. But we realised that a Dadurday didn’t just need to be a Saturday with the kids. A Dadurday could be any time a group of dads get together—any day of the week, with kids or without them.
The Selman crew came through—as expected, as ever—with some lovely design work that knocked it out of the park. I’ve been wandering around Barcelona today, sticking up these posters and getting Dadurdays out into the wild.
The Plan
22 WhatsApp groups. A meetup next week.
We’re starting with 22 cities. That covers 50 million people, and if an LLM tells me that means 10-12 million dads, I’m inclined to believe it. You can see the list at the end of this email. If you’re in one of those cities and interested in meeting other dads who read this newsletter, click the link and join the Whatsapp group. I realised I’d need a local ambassador dadmin in each city, and the Dadscord stepped up for half of them. If you’re wondering about the others, read on …
We will kick this off with a Global Dadurday on the 16/17th of November. This will be a B.Y.O.K. (Bring Your Own Kids) event on the weekend, where you can (hopefully) meet other dads whilst (hopefully) your kid(s) run around with other kids, leaving you free to hang out and chat with adults. Sure, It’ll never happen, but we can dream.
Sometime in the future, we’ll organise some kid-free hangs. If there’s the appetite for it from other dads in your area, we’ll also plan for men’s circles where you can sit down together—all baggage welcome—and work with others on working out your shit.
Dadurdays FAQs
So how’s this going to work then?
It’s easy. You join a group. You’ll end up with a bunch of dads who read this newsletter—folks who give a shit about the same kind of things you give a shit about. You might even end up meeting up with them.
Meeting up? That sounds quite vague. I’m going to need more than that.
We’ll start with three types of meetup:
With Kids (Park hangs. Library visits. Nature walks.)
Just Dads (Coffee in the morning. Drinks in the evening. Book Clubs.)
Men’s Circles (Meet other dads somewhere quiet. Go deep.)
But this is just a starting suggestion. Whatever kind of get-together you’d like to run locally, I will support it in any way I can. Men’s circles will depend on the local appetite and access to skilled and willing facilitators.
Won’t this be weird?
It depends. Some people are comfortable putting themselves out there. Others are not. And honestly, the easiest thing would be if we all didn’t do it: if I didn’t set this up, if the Dadmins didn’t say “I’m in,” and if you didn’t join. I am more nervous about doing this than anything else I’ve done in the history of TNF. Because there’s every chance this doesn’t work out. But—as someone who has lived in four different cities and started a new life in three of them—putting yourself out there can be the difference between a fulfilled and happy life filled with liked-minded souls and the opposite. My wife has always been better at this than I am—she has put our family in situations I would have happily avoided, in which I’ve met wonderful people I now love spending time with. I might not have done it myself. Even if I wanted to, where would I start? It’s time to change that. Not just for me, but for other dads who feel the same.
So, will it be weird? Who knows. The only way to find out is to join the WhatsApp group, introduce yourself, and see how things go from there. For me, the potential upside outweighs any possible downside I can see.
WhatsApp? WhysThat?
I get it. I don’t love Facebook Meta either. But the tl;dr is “I needed to use something to organise at least 22 groups and this was the only app that made it easy.”
For most folks, WhatsApp is what you use to message everyone you know. The group chats. The side-channel breakaway. The pop-up-for-a-party-invite chat. It’s only in the US that it isn’t widespread, but is increasing in popularity, having crossed 100m users earlier this year. Asking around in the Dadscord, it seems WhatsApp is becoming the central place for the school group chats. It’s now deemed an essential parenting app—so if you don’t have it yet, you’ll have it soon enough. For most of you, it’s going to be the lowest barrier to entry. iOS Messages would have excluded Android users. Telegram and Signal can’t run a community with local chapters. It’s the path of least resistance, which means the highest chance of adoption.
I can’t meet this weekend, but I am interested. When’s the next one?
When chatting to the initial set of Dadmins, some expressed a desire to choose their own time and dates inside the group (using Whatsapp polls, for instance). Others wanted a little more structure (a ”first Wednesday evening of the month” kinda thing). So we're kicking it off with a "with kids" meet-up on the 16th or 17th November. Check your local group for actual times and locations. After that, make sure you’re in the group, and stay tuned. It might be nice to get a Just Dads meetup in before Christmas. (The TNF Christmas Office Party? Yes, please.)
I am a natural community organiser. I love this. How can I help?
First, you are a wonderful human being. Second, the following cities do not have a dadmin: Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Providence, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Austin, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Sydney and Toronto. If you live in one and want to help out (run a group, identify a coffee shop or park for occasional meetups, or small tasks like this), please reply to this email to let me know you’re interested in helping out, or drop a message in the city Whatsapp group after you join.
Goldilocks Problem #1 (My city is too small).
Why haven’t you started a group for [city x] yet?!
Great question. When I asked where you were, 5% of you told me, “Here!” I then worked with Evan O’Neil—a Dadscord dad—who helped me transform hundreds of coordinates in 22 hotspots. If your city isn’t on there, it’s because I was worried that there wasn’t enough dad density near you to make a group sustainable. But that’s not to say it can’t work! I’m trying to launch this in a way that gives it the best chance of success so I can learn, iterate, and even create a future self-serve model that might work for any dad who wants to start a local chapter. Think of this as Phase One of the TNF Extended Universe. If you’d like your city to be included in Phase Two, there’s a link to tell me at the end of this email.
Goldilocks Problem #2 (My city is too big).
Whaddya mean [New York City | Los Angeles | London] Dads?! Are you mad? Do you know how big these places are? How’s that going to work?
Yeah, another good one. Of course, a “New York” group is almost too wide of a net to be helpful. If you’re in Brooklyn, who cares about a group of dads meeting in Central Park? But starting at the city level seems the only possible way to make this work. I would not be surprised if a dozen dads were reading this from my old stomping ground of Walthamstow—the leafy East London town that became the final resting place for thousands of plaid shirts migrating from Hackney. If this works—again, big if—there’s a version where London, LA and NYC groups divide, cell-like, into a series of smaller location-based subgroups. But that’s a problem for tomorrow.
If you’re in one of these bigger cities, finding a place to meet will be more of a challenge. For this initial event, just come into the group, say hello, and share where in the city you’re based. That should help a dadmin figure out where might work for a meeting spot.
Is this the bit where you ask us for money?
Nope. The local city communities will be 100% free. Thanks to our funding approach of “unlocking the commons,” a small subgroup of newsletter readers (currently ~2.5% of you) pay to keep this newsletter, and Dadurdays, accessible to all. We discussed the local meetup groups in the Dadscord and decided to open it up to all, with one caveat—anyone who joins should be a newsletter reader. Dads have told me it’s easier to get to deeper, more meaningful conversations when they meet other dads who read TNF. So we’re going to try and build on that going.
What a wonderful idea. Can I help “unlock the commons” and ensure Dadurdays stay free for everyone?
That’s very kind of you. You can do that here.
Is This It?
Like every TNF endeavour, I am assembling this parachute whilst hurtling towards the ground. This week has been busy—creating WhatsApp groups, setting up privileges and admins, writing this lengthy update, creating QR codes, printing and sticking posters. Have I accounted for everything? Absolutely not. Is there a chance this might fail? Absolutely. The worst-case scenario is nothing happens, and the status quo continues. Other cities might see a little activity, but don’t end up with a quantity of dads—either in number, or within a working distance—to make it work.
But there’s every chance something else might happen. You might meet some very good dads who live in your hood. Dads who are giving fatherhood their very best. Who are sorting their shit out, rather than passing it on. Who believe that fatherhood can be enjoyed, not just endured. And that becoming a dad isn’t their entire personality but an increasingly important piece of the pie as their priorities shift.
Will this work? I have no idea. But I’m fed up waiting to make the idea bullet-proof before putting it into the world. I see dads' conversations in the Dadscord, and what can happen when men feel they can congregate and open up in a safe space with a different set of norms. I remember how hard it was after my son was born and how much something like this would have helped. There are dads out now, reading this, feeling what I felt then. Others might not be in such dire straits but seek more meaningful connections with other dads asking similar existential questions. Some might be fathers of older kids (FOOKs) reaching back, confident that one day the young dads they help will pay it forward: an “I’ll buy the next guy’s coffee” but spread across years rather than minutes. (So long as one of you doesn’t mess it up by ordering 55 burgers.)
This has been in the pipeline for a while. But I almost didn’t send it. After waking on Wednesday, I wondered, “Will people still care?” Then I opened Google Photos and time travelled to November 8th, 2016. We’d recently arrived in San Francisco. I left the UK the day after the Brexit results were announced, the plane peeling off the runway as the country collapsed behind it, feeling like a character in a Roland Emmerich movie. We arrived in the US, telling everyone and their mother, “Don’t believe the polls; this could happen here too.” We were routinely ignored until sadly proven right.
Google Photos presented a few artefacts from the last time: a screenshot of the still-anxiety-inducing NYT needle, a photo of a flatscreen TV with a red bar growing and closing in on an inevitable 270, a thread of messages with a colleague and a shared sense of shock. And, amidst the chaos, a 21-second video of my daughter.
She is two years old. She sits in an ANTILOP, the white, easily-wiped IKEA high chair we know so well. As the video starts, she looks up to the camera—to me—and smiles. She smiles like she did when she was two, in a way I’d almost forgotten but have somehow always known. She smiles, and I am overwhelmed 8 years later, glowing internally as I revisit the moment. She looks at me and says: “Look at my belly." She then inflates it. Deflates it. She repeats the process, experimenting with how big she can make it. We laugh together.
You might be celebrating the news this week, or you might not. Sometimes, you’re on top of the wheel; other times, the wheel is on top of you. That day, eight years ago, there were moments when I was low. But listening to my laughter on that video I hear nothing pure joy.
That’s the gift our kids can bring. That’s the part of the garden we can tend.
Let’s do it together.
OK, enough chatter. Let me at the groups!
If you’ve got WhatsApp installed, all you need to do is click one of these links. Make sure to introduce yourself when you get in—who you are, how old your kids are, where in the city you live, and maybe even some of the things you’re into. I saw two dads in London talking about taking their kids bouldering sometime soon. So, you never know, this thing might actually work?!
North America
• Minneapolis: Join Group, Dadmin: Clint
• Chicago: Join Group, Dadmin: Dan
• Boston: Join Group, Dadmin: Carlos
• Denver: Join Group, Dadmin: Lee
• Washington DC: Join Group Dadmin: Rami
• Houston. Join Group Dadmin: Eliot
• New York: Join Group Dadmin: Jeremy / Robin
• Philadelphia: Join Group
• Charlotte: Join Group
• Austin: Join Group
• Los Angeles: Join Group
• Portland: Join Group
• Seattle: Join Group
• San Francisco: Join Group
• Toronto: Join Group
Europe
• London: Join Group, Dadmin: Adam
• Manchester: Join Group, Dadmin: Alex
• Berlin: Join Group, Dadmin: Eric
• Barcelona: Join Group, Dadmin: Kevin
• Amsterdam: Join Group
Australia
• Melbourne: Join Group
• Sydney: Join Group
Once again: If you’re living in a city without a dadmin and you want to help, please reply to this email or message me in the group to let me know! Expect to see Sam and I as “roaming dadmins” for a while. If your city isn’t here, and you think it should be, let me know so I can prioritise it for Phase Two.
“Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men.”
— James A. Baldwin
Say Hello
If you’re reading this, I didn’t bottle it. Hooray! So what do you think of Dadurdays?
Branding and Dadurdays work by Selman Design. Survey by Sprig.
Special thanks to all the Dadmins locked in for the ride. We now cut to live footage from first dad meetup going exactly to plan:
Looks like the New York link is pointing to the DC Whatsapp group
Hey Kev! What about Dadurdays in Paris? There are tons of English-speaking expat (not only!) dads here who would love to mobilize our dadbods for a day of dadjokes. Let me know!