Seattle Freeze no more — this event greets newcomers with warm bear hugs

How to Seattle

If you’ve ever tried to find new friends or join an interest group in this city, the fear of being rebuffed by the alleged Seattle Freeze might hang over you like an intimidating storm cloud. What if there was a low-stakes way to discover places and activities in the Emerald City that speak to you — and dozens of people all looking for the same thing?

Last month, I met up with 100 other Seattleites — brand-new transplants and longtime residents alike — at Seattle Welcome Day, a once-a-month gathering at Town Hall Seattle with a $20 sign-up fee. The payoff? A chance to draft your new “vision of life” in Seattle and forge connections with those who share similar interests and goals. 

How to “embrace being a Seattleite”

Whether you believe in the Seattle Freeze, social isolation is commonplace across the country. A late 2024 Household Pulse Survey by the Census Bureau found that over 40% of American adults reported feeling lonely at least some of the time. In Washington, a similar amount of people felt the same — about 41% of adults. 

Social isolation is one of the most dangerous threats to our democracy, according to Seattle entrepreneur Aaron Hurst, adding that it inhibits our ability to collectively solve complex challenges like climate change and housing affordability. It’s become such an issue that then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” in 2023 and the World Health Organization formed a commission to foster social connection to propose a global response by 2026. 

Hurst experienced the struggles of social isolation himself when he moved to Ballard from Brooklyn, N.Y., about 11 years ago and “complained about it for so long,” he said.

One day, he’d finally had enough and was inspired to tackle Seattle’s social isolation problem himself. That meant inviting strangers into his home for dinner. As scary as it seemed, Hurst was able to have honest conversations with people about their experiences with (or lack of) connection in the city. 

Hurst, along with social connection expert Linsey Morrison, developed Welcome Days, a citywide initiative based on employee onboarding models from Amazon and the University of Washington. Run by the Chamber of Connection and Town Hall Seattle, two nonprofit organizations, participants register for a day of organized programming that identifies goals for life in Seattle and gathers advice from locals on activities, events and communities to explore. 

The first Welcome Day took place in February. By the time I attended the second one in March, the Chamber of Connection was already making changes to improve the event structure based on participants’ feedback. 

With the help of 45 leaders from Seattle-based companies, nonprofits, universities, faith-based organizations and more — the Seattle Welcome Committee, Hurst calls it — Welcome Days are designed to reach as many communities as possible from different sectors in the city.

“Your success is really tied to your investment in connection and building that motivation,” Hurst said. “Seattle Welcome Day is really a four-hour experience that’s designed to make you embrace being a Seattleite.”

So how do you actually build connections in Seattle? 

When Charlotte Massey first moved to Seattle in 2021 with her husband for his job, making new friends proved to be a challenge. Her solution was to make a spreadsheet of “friendship leads” and check in with each contact — a tedious tactic she says was effective, albeit frustrating. 

“(Making friends) was something that nobody had taught me how to do,” she said. “I had to work through that whole process on my own.”

Massey, now the executive director for the Chamber of Connection, found that people wanted a “third place”: a space to make social connections outside of the home and workplace. She began hosting summer picnics, where up to 100 people were able to share a meal and get to know each other in a low-pressure environment. When the weather got too cold for outdoor hangouts, she began hosting monthly craft nights in Ballard. But as the demand for these events kept growing, it became harder to keep up.

Welcome Days provide that third place for people to socialize, Massey said. At these meetups, located in downtown Seattle, you walk through the door, receive a bear hug (from a mascot, no real bears in sight) and settle into small groups of five to 10. You’re then provided with a journal — a workbook of sorts — that walks you through a scientifically designed social checklist. 

This checklist, called the “6 Points of Connection,” focuses on different areas where you form connections and identifies opportunities for new activities or social bonds. These are: relationships; neighborhood contact; third place; community of identity; community of activity, play or interest; and community service. 

Once you’ve answered prompts in your journal about each of these points, you’re given time to debrief your responses with a partner or as a small group. As I went through the “identity” section of my journal, my partner and I both confessed to being introverts and that participating in these exercises with strangers was quite outside of our comfort zone. That confession sparked a conversation with our other groupmates about the undeniable, and rather underutilized, power of listening. Turns out, there’s a whole book on that, which a groupmate suggested we all add to our reading lists. 

During Welcome Day, everyone gets a chance to ask the room for help with their vision for living in Seattle, whether it’s joining a local sports league or finding a place to volunteer. People wanted to hear about everything: where to find a deli up to East Coast standards (Dingfelder’s was the group consensus), theater troupes for local playwrights and silent disco parties.

When it was my turn, I asked for local kayaking group suggestions (having just moved from Queen Anne to West Seattle, with Alki a mere bus ride away), plus a place to volunteer. A fellow groupmate pointed out Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, which hosts monthly kayak cleanups. It’s now at the top of my bucket list.

After Welcome Day ends, participants have a chance to stay connected online via the Newcomer Club on the Heylo app. Here, people can meet up at Neighborhood Clubhouse events close to their home and join specific channels depending on their interests or identities. As of this week, nearly 200 people have joined, and will include people from future Welcome Days. 

I showed up to Welcome Day not knowing who would be waiting for me and what I would get out of this experience. A hundred new friends and a journal that essentially became a Seattle bucket list seem like a pretty good outcome to me. As a fellow participant told Hurst, you come to Welcome Day to learn about Seattle, and you end up learning a lot more about yourself.

This is what the Chamber of Connection had hoped for when it started Welcome Days in the first place, Hurst said. 

“We didn’t know if it was going to be a certain demographic or a certain community,” he said. “We had people who were 18 and people who were 80 … it was the most diverse room I’ve ever been in, (in) Seattle. It was really affirming that this is actually something that can bring us all together.”

A sustainable model for connection

With two Welcome Days successfully completed, the Chamber of Connection’s vision is not just for this city to continue building the framework for social connection, but for other cities across the country to do the same, Hurst said. Creating a space to form new relationships is just the first step to create long-term support for community builders.

“We need people doing that on-the-ground, smaller community-building work at the neighborhood level in every city across the country, but we also need to be able to provide the support structure for that,” Massey said. “We need to create the onramp so that when someone moves to a new city — or even is in a transition point and identifies that they’re lacking connection — that they have the tools to find their community.”