Hurray!!! After weeks of hosting rooms with, and for, Italians in America, on March 7 2021 I founded the club Italiani in America on Clubhouse, the first Club on the app for all the Italians in USA and Canada! Its been only 2 days, but it has already grown in an amazing community and gathered tons of compliments and consents, filling my heart and the hearts of all those who have been part of the project since the beginning!
Let me give you a little backstory on how we got here. Since joining Clubhouse in late January, I found myself spending most of the time in rooms with my closest friends who are Italians living in the USA, and one from Canada, talking about our life as expats on this side of the world. When we started opening rooms, we gathered right away a great consent: the rooms were lasting long, over 10 hours per day, filled with many speakers and listeners who kept coming back regularly even to just say a quick hello. We started a group on Telegram to keep in touch and share the links of the rooms we were opening, creating already a small sense of community among us Italians expat in the US and Canada. I wanted to open a club right away to have a space for all of us to open rooms regularly for and with others like us Italians in the US and Canada, however the app had a very long approval process for new Clubs, so for weeks I was just waiting for my Club request to be accepted. This changed with the Clubhouse update that happened the first week of March 2021, which allowed almost everyone to create a Club without going through a long approval process, and so I went ahead and created the Italiani in America Club as soon as I realized that new option was available!
With the help of the Club cofounders and rooms moderators and regulars, in less than 48 hours the Club has reached over 150 members/followers! Thanks Elvira, Lara, Fabiana, Susanna, Eleonora, Fabrizio, Gerry, Hannah, Ivano, Alessandra, Annie, Shamanta, Dino, Francesca, Linda, Tony, Gianluca and all the other people who contributed to the Club creation and success!
If you already have Clubhouse and you are looking for a club with rooms with Italians in the United States, please consider searching for the club “Italiani in America” and send a follow request to receive a notification and participate in all the rooms we will open. If you would like to host a room in our Club, about a topic you are passionate or expert about that can be of interest for Italians living in the United States or in Canada, please reach out and send me a message on Instagram (@areide).
For those reading who don’t know what Clubhouse is, this might be because at the moment is an invitation-only social network app available only for iPhone. There is the plan to open the registration to all and release an Android app, but there is no sure date as of now on both of those things. You can however already install the app on your iPhone/iPad, or even a friend iPhone/iPad, and sign up with your cellphone number to reserve your username. There is the chance that one of your friends, who is already on Clubhouse, will receive a notification when you sign up and will be able to let you in with a click; this feature however doesn’t always work, so the easiest way to get on Clubhouse is to get a direct invite from a friend. I am personally careful with my invites, and only give them to people I know, especially because when you invite someone, your name will show up forever on that person profile on Clubhouse and I would prefer not to be associated with someone who will use the app violating the rules. For more information on Clubhouse, I suggest to visit the official website https://www.joinclubhouse.com/ that has an extensive FAQ section, rules, terms and conditions of use of the app.
