The Community Garden Collective

Kaitlyn & H's Friendship AGM: A Relational Trust-Building Exercise

Two years ago, my friends Kaitlyn and H introduced me to the Friendship AGM, a series of question they'd co-created to check in on the state of their friendship. (Unrelated, Kaitlyn and H have been huge inspirations for diving into the indie blogging scene and thinking more about slow tech. You can visit Kaitlyn's website here for her amazing work.)

Two years ago, I took their AGM questions and invited my friend, Iris, to participate. We sat down at a Hong Kong Cafe near my family home, ordered some lovely, nostalgic food, then locked in to go through these questions together. We didn't take any notes.

Two years later, Iris was scrolling through her photos when she found a screenshot of the questions I'd sent that day. "We should do it again," she said. The next day, we hopped on a Discord call at 10pm. Iris' husband assumed we were gaming together, and when she explained that we're doing an AGM, her husband worried that we might be breaking up. We laughed, but I reminded her that she had the same anxiety two years ago when I brought this forward. What if we tell each other things we're not ready to hear? What if we do end our friendship here?

After all, we're both raised the way we were raised. Honesty does not come easily. Both of us have learned early on that being honest results in blame, guilt, and retaliation, among other things...and both of us love and care for each other enough not to repeat the mistakes of others. If only we could tell our nervous systems that every time.

Iris and I have known each other for fourteen years at the time of writing. In that time, I've moved to three different cities to escape the expectations of my family, to find myself and my community, and to build something that feels like my own. All that to say, Iris has seen me through almost every phase of my life--she's been my community through it all. In fourteen years, I've also become a teacher, a brief finance bro, and now a counsellor and social worker. I've gained a lot more practice in reading the patterns of myself and others, and I've become quite adept at pointing out our most toxic shared traits (with humour, of course). All that to say, Iris and I grew up together, are growing together, and will continue to grow alongside each other in a way that I never want to take for granted.

Our last Friendship AGM over Discord affirmed for me that this is a person I can irrevocably trust. We were vulnerable, honest, and the world didn't end. Building capacity for trust is how we build capacity for courage, the courage to take up space, to do the things that scare us, maybe even to embrace conflict. (We talked a lot about conflict!)

In this post, I want to offer Kaitlyn and H's Friendship AGM to you as an alternative way to understand what our relationships need. My Mad Mapping guide can be a lot. Perhaps we still need to build our emotional safety with our loved ones, or perhaps you want something more short-form, more consistent, etc. Maybe you just want a different set of questions!

Whatever the case, I loved this exercise, and perhaps you will too :)

So, what is a Friendship AGM?

In short, it's an annual (or biannual, or however frequently you'd like) check in with a friend. It's pretty simple: sit down with a friend, go over a series of questions. Hold space for each other's answers.

For all of you visual learners, Kaitlyn has written a zine about it with wonderful examples under each question!

For all of you big-picture-zooming-into-finer-detail brains, here is the list of questions:

  1. How did the last 12 months go for us?
  2. Current physical distance/locations still ok for meeting up/connecting with each other?
  3. Current frequency of contact/time investment ok?
  4. Which communication methods work best for us?
  5. One-on-one vs group friendship considerations?
  6. What are things that we find really affirming/things that feel good that we already do really well, and that we want to keep doing?
  7. Any considerations to keep in mind regarding boundaries/capacity/triggers?
  8. Any considerations to remember regarding needs/validation/recognition?
  9. How would we like to communicate and hold discussion around hard topics?
  10. Is there anything we can do to better support/deepen our friendship that we would like to explore?
  11. Do you feel like your needs in our friendship are currently being met? (are there needs that aren’t being met in your other relationships that we could support each other with?)
  12. What would we like to happen in the next 12 months?
  13. What are our hopes, dreams, and shared friendship goals?
  14. What are our goals regarding growth (individually or collectively), and are there ways we can support each other in them, if applicable?
  15. Are we happy and would we like to continue being friends?

Process

Iris and I each had the list of questions in front of us, but Iris was the unofficial facilitator. She read each question and invited me to go first if nothing came to mind. I often went first anyway as a highly opinionated person with too much to say most of the time. I tossed the question back to Iris whenever I felt like she needed permission to jump in.

That's it! If your conversation was particularly serious or uncomfortable, perhaps schedule in a way to decompress and laugh at the end. If there are things that didn't sit well, maybe scheduling a follow-up check in would be more your style.

For us, we decided to write a letter to each other. My messy prompt sent to our private chat reads as follows:

In the next few days: write a friendship letter that captures general feelings, touch on any of the points discussed if you want, touch on things you didn't feel comfortable saying if you want, and summarize goals (last three questions if we're ignoring the very last question)

At the end of the day, here is what we learned: