Hoboken Listener Group Draws First Out-of-Town Attendees, Membership Reaches Seventeen
A Hoboken listening group built around the podcast 'Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA' drew its first out-of-town attendees at its second meeting, with four Newark residents making the trip on their own initiative. Membership now stands at seventeen.
Hoboken Listener Group Draws First Out-of-Town Attendees, Membership Reaches Seventeen
Seventeen people is not a movement. But it may be something.
The informal listening group that formed around the bilingual podcast Nous Sommes RONA / We Are RONA held its second biweekly meeting at a Hoboken Public Library branch last week, and for the first time, not everyone in the room was from Hoboken. Four residents of Newark — including a retired postal worker and a community college student who said they found the group through the podcast's listener forum — made the trip from Essex County without any institutional nudging, any flyer campaign, or any organized outreach. They simply showed up.
Organizers, who started with eleven people and no budget, say they are now thinking quietly about whether a companion group might take shape in Newark. They have not asked anyone for permission or funding.
That, perhaps as much as the seventeen names on the sign-in sheet, is the small and telling detail here: in a four-year-old republic still working out what it means to be RONAn in English-dominant New Jersey, some of that work is happening on a Tuesday evening in a library meeting room, one commuter at a time.