In 2023, the Surgeon General called loneliness a public health crisis. Gallup found that one in five people feels lonely at work.

One in five.

If you work remotely in L&D, you might not call it loneliness. You're busy. Your calendar's full. You're on Slack, on Teams, on Zoom. You're collaborating. You're getting things done.

But when's the last time you had a conversation about L&D that wasn't about a deadline?

Remote work took the place where you used to run into people. Where you'd grab coffee and end up talking to someone from another team about what they're working on. Where a two-minute conversation turned into twenty minutes of the most useful exchange you had all week.

The hallway conversation? The random run-in? The "hey, can I ask you something" that goes completely sideways in the best way?

You can't schedule that on Zoom. You can't Slack your way into it.

And here's the thing nobody really admits: you can be connected all day and still feel isolated.

Not because you're alone. But because every conversation has a purpose now. There's a meeting agenda. A project update. A decision to make. Even the casual messages are usually about moving something forward.

Those connections exist to accomplish something. And when the something's done, the connection kind of fades.

What gets lost is the kind of conversation that exists just because. 

That's the space we're creating.

We're the place where you show up and see who's there. Where someone mentions something they're stuck on and three people jump in with "oh, I tried that." Where you can float an idea that's not ready yet and nobody's grading you on it.

You don't need an agenda. You don't need to have it figured out. You just need to care about this work and want to be around other people who get it.

Your team's on Teams. And that's fine.

They're the people you work with. The ones helping you get things done. The ones you're building programs with.

But your community? Your community is right here.

We're the people who understand what it's like to navigate stakeholder conversations that go nowhere. To build a program you're excited about only to have it get deprioritized. To wonder if anyone actually cares about learning the way you do.

When you connect with ATD-Orange County, you're investing in the part of your development that doesn't show up on a resume. You're starting conversations that challenge your thinking, sparking relationships that remind you why this work matters, joining a community that helps you grow as a practitioner, not just a performer.

Come find us.

We meet regularly. We talk about what's actually happening in our work—the messy stuff, the failures, the things we're trying to figure out. We share what's working. We admit what's not. We leave feeling a little more grounded, a little less like we're making this up as we go.

Ready to connect? Become a member. Join us at one of our upcoming events. Your community is waiting.