10 Years of the City Girl Network

Ten years ago, I made a decision that changed my life and the lives of thousands of people across the country.

I decided to host a coffee meet up for women living in Brighton who were looking for friends, housemates, travel companions and local guides. All the many different types of relationships that make a city feel like home.

I moved to Brighton from Milton Keynes at 22, having spent much of my life wishing to be a Brighton Girl. I was swept up in the romance of living in a seaside city abundant with independent shops, writers, poets, artists and musicians on every street corner.

Yet, when I moved here – journalism degree in one hand and piano in the other – that sense of “home” didn’t come.

The seed for that life-changing decision was planted in October 2015 when I created an online magazine called Brighton Girl. It was inspired by a walk along the beach where I saw a girl who looked like me and wondered whether she was struggling to feel at home too.

I went home that night and built a wordpress site on my bedroom floor, reaching out to local bloggers to help write content. It was a great distraction, but something was missing.

The decision to create that fateful coffee meet up came when I realised I hadn’t met any readers (or, rather, potential readers) in person. That resulted in a quick sign up to MeetUp and the creation of the Brighton Girl Coffee Meet Up, dated five days from then. Thankfully, I didn’t have the events experience then to know that giving a five day lead time is a terrible idea.

Seventeen girls turned up that day. All alone. All wanting to feel at home. These days, we would call it a space for connection, community and belonging. Back then, it was just 17 girls in a coffee shop figuring out if they could be friends. Many of them are still friends today.

That coffee meet up happened again every month, interspersed by drinks, book clubs, walks, runs, crafts, dinners and an abundance of other social activities. By the time we got to 1000 members, two of them approached me to set up the same thing in the cities they were moving to – Edinburgh and Berlin. And with that, the City Girl Network was born.

There’s a very good chance you know most of that origin story. You may also know that we’re now in 27 locations, run 50 events a month, have 160 volunteers and reach over 250,000 people (60,000 people in Sussex). You’ll also hopefully know that we have developed a business directory, advertising offering, awards and a jobs board.

As I hit this 10 year milestone, I’m struggling to comprehend quite how it all happened.

There have been so many chapters of this journey: realising I’d accidentally created a business, quitting my full time job to focus on it, freelancing to make ends meet as I hadn’t worked out a revenue structure, sofa surfing on Brighton Girl sofas after a relationship breakdown when I had no money for a deposit. That’s all in the first 18 months.

I understand now that I was in a unique position of having customers without the product. Community businesses weren’t a thing back then; for many, I helped iron out the blueprint with all of the mistakes I made. It was always going to be a wild ride.

It’s no secret that it took years for me to take a salary from the business, caused by a serious lack of self confidence and crushing imposter syndrome. It was only two years ago that I stopped the cycle of working part time to fund the business; which was mostly spent on paying other people to do the work that I could do.

If I’m honest, I think it’s taken me the whole decade to truly believe I’m the right person for this role. I blame the patriarchy for that, by the way.

What’s held me up for all these years is the very reason why I’m here writing this: community.

Not just the one that I built, but the Sussex business community that we all belong to. For starters, I am one of the many people who our very own Jackie and Sam have platformed over the years, which has opened doors upon doors of support.

I realised long ago that the real reason that the City Girl Network exists is because I was lonely. I just didn’t have the literacy for it at the time; I thought ‘lonely’ was reserved for much older people.

The business world is very lonely too, without people like you in it.

To every person that I’ve had the privilege of connecting with over the last decade: thank you for showing me what it means to be home.