The Village Women Concept

To my reader, hello

It is Kelly here and I promise to use no A.I. in writing this blog post, so bear with my grammar and spelling shortcomings. As I mentioned in my reel today, the village women concept comes from a few moments in time.

Here they are:

• I had my first mammogram, they found something 'slightly' abnormal and I felt like I had no one to share the stress and worry with (all is now fine). I didn't want to open up and I didn't want to burden friends.
  
  
• I had seen my friends that weekend but left the braai (BBQ) feeling like I hadn't completed a single conversation, nor did I really know how my friends were, beneath the kids and life veil we all wear.
  
  
• I overheard a friend mentioning how sick her mom had been — she had been in and out of hospital that week — and I had no idea. I was angry that I hadn't been there for her!
  
  
• I realized that I was missing my village. I had one, but it wasn't working for me, and so I decided to initiate an evening to try and patch up this missing concept in my life.
  
  

The joke is that women have existed in villages for all of time, but as I sit here at my computer in 2025, I am more distant and disconnected from my friends in the flesh than any human that has ever come before me. Women have walked past each other in villages daily — they have gathered around pots of food, around feeding babies, or in the fields as they foraged for food.

The Western woman in 2025 is lucky if she gathers around women in the flesh daily. We gather on Zoom, we shop online, we live behind walls — and I feel like we are missing REAL human-to-human moments.

As women, we are craving things like retreats, walks, or escapes from our 'alone' lives — and this is because our daily village no longer exists.

I hope this post gives you the courage to start a Village Women group. All of us need one.

Now the key with Village Women is that it needs to be a group of friends who you know and like. I would recommend that most of the women know each other — this promotes more openness — and I would also recommend some vino to loosen things up a bit. Aim for 8–10 ladies max.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create your Village Women group:

1. Tell your group of friends that you would like to start a Village Women’s group, and ask who would be keen to join in. Then start a Village Women WhatsApp group.
   
   
2. Aim to meet once a month, and everyone has a chance to host. Hosting entails meeting in your lounge, ordering takeaways (no cooking allowed, no stress allowed), and providing the wine glasses. Everyone brings some wine, and all must arrive promptly at 7:30/8 p.m. Set the next meeting date at each event.
   
   
3. A chilled dinner and a glass of wine get the evening off to a good start.
   
   
4. Once you have eaten, you — as the host (or you can nominate your toastmaster friend) — get the circle ready for the topic of the night. I’ve added my list of topics below, but really, any life-linked topic will work. This topic needs to be sent to the members during the day prior to the event, so please give it some thought.
   
   
5. The kicker! The first 2 or 3 village nights need to begin with everyone telling their life stories. I cannot tell you how incredible it is to sit amongst women that you know and love and hear these stories.
   If you think about it, we would all know each other's life stories if we were still living in villages. These stories paint your friends with new colours — they make you feel deeper for some or understand others a little more. It is SUPER powerful and helps the group feel more connected and deep.
   
   
6. The village needs to show up for each other. There would be very few times in a real village where you’d walk to the tree and find no one. The gatherings need committed members.
   
   

Here are a few of the topics that I have planned for my group:

• Our changing relationships with our aging parents, and how we are navigating them
  
  
• Marriage, intimacy changes, and how we keep our relationships strong
  
  
• Money: are we saving, how are we saving, crypto, shares, life policies, and everything in between
  
  
• Parenting in this digital era: screen time limits, Artificial Intelligence, how we use technology to help and not cripple us
  
  
• The feeling of a midlife crisis — what this seems to feel like, how we navigate these feelings, and what we now value compared to our younger years
  
  

Then the last thing you need to do is to share a picture with me on IG using the #villagewomen

Maybe one day, all the villages can come together — in the flesh :)

To women supporting women,
Love, Kelly