Avani Parekh for Community Pros Yearbook 2025

Speakers: Avani Parekh, Community Builder

Avani Parekh: Hey, everybody, I'm Avani. I'm a community builder based out of Bangalore, India. And one important personal reflection that I've been thinking a lot about in 2025 is how many of us as community pros have spent time trying to get people online and engaging digitally, building communities online, and I feel that the need of the hour is truly for us to create bridges for our community members to be in real life with one another. With this preponderance of the age of loneliness and the way that people are feeling really disconnected, it feels even more imperative for us to play a role in bridging that gap between the spaces that we've created digitally and something that we can help people connect to in real life, basically to help people go touch grass. So that's been one of my biggest reflections this year.

Avani Parekh: I think what's coming next for 2026 is something that's really interesting. There's gonna be sort of like a bifurcation between community builders that build for scale. And for, you know, a large number of people, and some folks that specialize in depth and niche community building, because I can see that socially people are moving towards more intimate spaces. This has been happening for a good 4 or 5 years now. Well, professionally, we're being really call to sort of like, bring more and more people into the fold, right? A lot of us also moonlight as sort of like growth hackers and growth marketers as well as a part of our role in community. And so, I feel that we will specialize in terms of building for scale and those of us that sort of build for depth and for intimacy, and we'll get to learn from one another and cross pollinate. That's my prediction.