Cellphones are shut off. The tweets have stopped streaming out. It’s a Wednesday night in January, and 60 young “influencers” have gathered to talk. The setting, a café in downtown Salt Lake City, serves as a discussion room for the Futurists, an ambitiously-named, invite-only group of twenty-somethings (and a few in their 30s) charged with visualizing the future of the outdoor world.
“We are committed to the outdoor industry and want to have a voice in its future direction,” said Stasia Raines, one of the group’s founders.
Raines and cofounder Deanna Lloyd organize the Futurist meetings in conjunction with the twice-annual Outdoor Retailer trade show in Utah. It kicked off last winter with 17 attendees but ballooned to more than 50 people in August who met in the upper room of a brew pub near the convention hall.
I attended the January meeting this year along with gear designers, marketers, athletes, other journalists, and environmental activists from around the U.S. Despite the social atmosphere and free food, the Futurist meetings are not networking events. Business cards are banned during the discussion times.
Instead, for two hours the group is focused on conversation and the sharing of ideas. Raines and Lloyd moderate. You share ideas and move table to table, talking through a list of questions and topics with a diverse group of young go-getters who otherwise would rarely be in the same space.
“It pulls down professional barriers,” said Yoon Kim, the founder of startup media company Blogs for Brands. “By guiding the topic of conversation, the setting requires all parties to be a bit vulnerable. There’s a trust factor that is built from that process.”
