About us: story-led
Page Library
About us: story-led
An about page for organizations with a story worth telling. Instead of values grids and stats, it reads like a feature article: a quiet opening, then three chapters of the founding story, each beside a large photo that alternates sides, a pull quote from a founder, and a year-by-year timeline. It ends with a simple invitation to join. Rewrite the chapters in your own voice, keep them short, swap in real photos from your archive, and adjust the milestones to your own years.
The story of Harborview Members Club
It started with six people and a kitchen table.
How a handful of neighbors with a shared question turned into a club of thousands, and what we learned along the way.
2018
Chapter one: a question nobody could answer
In the winter of 2018, Anna Kowalski moved to Portland and asked a simple question: where do people like me go to learn from each other? Nobody had a good answer.
So she invited five neighbors over. They talked until midnight, filled a notebook with ideas and agreed to try one thing: a monthly email that shared what each of them had learned that month.
2019
Chapter two: the room that was too small
The email went to 40 people, then 400. Readers kept replying with the same request: can we meet?
The first meetup was booked for the back room of a cafe that seated 25. Sixty-one people came. They stood along the walls, sat on the floor and stayed an hour after the cafe should have closed. That night the founders decided this needed to be a proper club, with members, a home online and a reason to keep showing up.
We never set out to build an organization. We just kept saying yes to the people who turned up, and one day we looked around and there were thousands of them.
Today
Chapter three: a club that belongs to its members
Harborview Members Club now has members in every state, an online library they helped write and events from Maine to California. Members vote on the board, suggest the topics and lead half of our sessions.
The kitchen table is still in Anna's house. Once a year, the six founders sit around it again and ask the same question they started with: is this still the place we wished existed?
Milestones
2018
The first monthly email goes out to 40 friends and neighbors.
2019
Sixty-one people squeeze into the first meetup. Membership opens in the fall.
2020
The members area launches, with online sessions every week while events are paused.
2022
Membership passes 2,000. Members elect the first board.
2024
The library reaches 500 guides and videos, most of them written by members.
2026
Regional chapters open in five cities, and the annual gathering sells out in a day.
The next chapter has your name in it.
Join today and help write what comes next.
Use this page
Make it yours in a few minutes
- Find it in your Control Panel. Go to Content > Page Library and search for "About us: story-led".
- Add it to your site. Choose a title and a department. The page arrives as a draft, with its pictures copied to your site and your site's name already in place.
- Change the words and pictures. Open it in the page builder, replace the sample text and images with your own, and make it live when you are ready.