Hello World

First of all, I don't have the answers. I have absolutely no experience building a community be it online or in life. Although the ultimate goal here is to create a real place where people can go to dance and connect with their community, I'm reaching out here for help in getting to that goal.

Personal History
I grew up in Alaska and have been intrigued and moved by dance since birth. I have really been dancing my whole life, though my technical training really only started 8 years ago. I went to school at the University of Northern Colorado. I took the opportunity to study in Buenos Aires for 6 months to study Spanish, Latin America, and Tango. The experience was invaluable, but I found it difficult to be away from my family and friends. There are many things that I miss about the culture though: the sense of never being in a hurry, long meal times, the fact that so many people there dance. I hardly went to a party or place where people weren't dancing. When I came back to Colorado I became frustrated with the major programs offered as UNC and the lack of support for the dance program so I decided to design my own major based on a dance therapy program. My courses included Psychology, Biology, Kinesiology, and of course, as many dance classes as I could fit in. I also completed and undergraduate Honors thesis titled Dance: a Natural and Necessary Part of Life as Indicated by Indigenous Cultures from Around the World. It sounds long and complicated but the short title is A New Journey in Dance. I'll come back to this in a second. Since graduation I've moved to Denver with my boyfriend (an actor) and found a job with a company that deals with indoor air pollution. However, I have bigger dreams.

The Thesis
I studied indigenous cultures from the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia in the effort to narrow down the reasons why these peoples lives were so interconnected with The Dance. Different peoples used dance for different reasons, but in every situation, dancing brought the people together, uniting the community. I know from my own experience that when you dance with someone, you create a relationship with them without even trying. When people in a community dance together, the relationships they build with themselves, their neighbors, and their environment become very strong. The people become so dedicated to the community that the community itself gets stronger. The people are united by more than proximity.

Although I really love my country, I have always felt a sense of loneliness, of disconnect from the people around me, of lack of community. I was very fortunate to grow up in a very loving and supportive family... but that was where it stopped. I have found through my current work that it is the minority of people who know their neighbors last names, or the first names of the people two houses down. And unless they go to church on Sundays, very few people have social hobbies.

The Dream
I long for a place where people can go just to be together and to enjoy dance, exercise is an added bonus ;). I imagine a community center where a hundred people come every Friday or Saturday night. Where they choose from a list of dance styles offered and, for and hour, learn basic steps and gain the confidence to move across the floor. Then everyone comes together and we spend the rest of the night going through the various musical styles. Those that didn't take the class have the opportunity to learn from those who did and everyone gets to dance and be together. We will dance because we love to. We will dance because we want to be together. We will dance to laugh and learn. This will be a place where everyone can dance no matter their age, gender, or level of ability. We are not dancing because we are particularly talented at it... we just love to do it.