This is my entry for the Love Your Steem Communities Contest for the #powerhousecreatives community!

For this contest Hive account@zord189 asked us to introduce and talk about another Steem community, other than the PHC, that has also contributed and impacted lives on the Steem blockchain. So today I am going to tell you about a local Steem community that I run, the Southern California Steem community @SoCalSteemit!

Brief History -

Back in December of 2017 I met up at a restaurant with a couple Steemians and we started talking about starting a Steem community for Southern California. We saw them forming elsewhere and figured why not start one here. We opened the Hive account@socalsteemit account and started a Discord server for the community. Then we started finding people to join. Looking for both people already on Steemit and those not yet on Steemit. And we started planning meetups! During that time we found Hive account@mariannewest who had also been trying to start a Steem community and schedule meetups in San Diego, CA. She joined the group and became my partner in running it! With the support of Marianne, our community leaders Hive account@csusbgeochem1 and Hive account@alaqrab, some of our long time dedicated members like Hive account@mattlovell, Hive account@creationofcare, Hive account@kunschj, Hive account@steemseph, and a few others, as well as support from other great communities like Hive account@qurator and Hive account@canna-curate, we have continued to grow and improve!!

Our first official meetup

Importance of Community -

Once I found Steem I was trying to get everyone I know to join and it was quite frustrating to see most of them all give up after only a few posts because they put a bunch of effort into an awesome post and only made .05 or less. Having a Steem community where you can immediately find support and make connections and friendships can make all the difference in a new users Steem experience. I saw first hand how important finding great communities like the Hive account@steemitbloggers was. People I knew that didn't join a community lost interest, got dishearten and disappeared from the platform. While I continued to blog and make new friends within these communities and receive lots of support from them. Now by creating SoCal Steemit I have made it possible for me to onboard a brand new user here in SoCal and have them able to get immediate support and interaction from our community. And what a better way to start than by making new friends!!

About Us -

SoCal Steemit is dedicated to building and supporting the Steemit community of Southern California. Our members use #socalsteemit on their posts so that we, as well as fellow members, can easily find and support those posts. In addition to supporting our members with upvotes, SoCal Steemit chooses one member each week to be our "SoCal Steemian of the week". We run a weekly "SoCal Spotlight" curation post which features 5 of the posts using the #socalsteemit tag. We are running 2 weekly contests. The "Show Us Your California" contest, and the "Mystery Photo Fridays" contest where members can win SBI! We are having weekly voice chats every tuesday at 8pm PST on our Discord server, and are scheduling monthly in person meetups all over Southern California! We also have a facebook group and a meetup.com group and we have plans to keep doing even more fun stuff to keep building and supporting this awesome Steem community!

Most Recent Meetups -

In our more recent meetups we were invited by Hive account@steemseph to watch him and his band Hive account@steelparade perform at Taco Surf in Surfside, CA which you can read about here, we were invited to the home of Hive account@improv and Hive account@stinawog to play games for "Thanksgaming" which you can read about here, we met up and had a bunch of fun going bowling at the Brunswick Lanes in Norco, CA which you can read about here, and most recently we were invited by Hive account@melbookermusic to come see his band Mel Booker and King play at the Maui Sugar Mill Saloon in Tarzana, CA which you can read about here, here, here, here, here, and here!

Mel Booker and King
(Photo by Hive account@kunschj)

And that's my entry for the Love Your Steem Communities Contest by Hive account@zord189!

If you have any questions or are interested in joining SoCal Steemit tell me in the comments below or contact me on our Discord server.

If you would like to support our community consider joining the SoCalSteemit curation trail or giving a delegation

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Thanks for reading!!

all photos by Hive account@derekrichardson except where otherwise noted

https://www.californiamountainadventure.com
Contact me on Discord

#SoCalSteemit is building and supporting the Steemit community of Southern California. If you are from SoCal and are into creating quality content here on Steemit, we'd love for you to follow us @SoCalSteemit and join our group on Discord

Animation By Hive account@zord189