Five Ways to Meet People with Green Dating and Social Networking

ckane — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

1. Take a killer, but appropriate for you, photo to use for all your social networking sites--that's your first and best way to grab people's attention. If you want to meet friends to go camping with, put up a photo of you camping. (If all you have is an out-of-focus mugshot, that's not going to work.)

2. Don't just join Facebook (or MySpace, etc.), then sit back and wait for the messages to come rolling in. Join in the conversation. Find or start groups that describe you--here's a few I found (among all the admittedly more-prevalent-on-Facebook jokey groups) Organic Gardening 101, Slow Food NYC. Then participate in the discussions and when you like what someone says, add them as a friend or send them a message.

3. There are numerous dating services created just to connect green singles and friends, and I should add to that list Care2 (definitely check out this cause-oriented social networking/dating site), but you should still work the mainstream ones like Match and eHarmony, because they're better known, so they have more members. Just be as specific as you can when describing yourself and your interests to weed out potential global- warming skeptics (aka, dumb people).

4. In the real world, volunteer for you favorite politician, cause, concert series, or independent radio station. Go to idealist.org for volunteer opportunities and events, and another resource for volunteer opportunities or "activity partners" is good old Craigslist.org.

5. Here's another real-life option: Take a class in gourmet vegetarian cooking or green homebuilding or whatever subject in which you've always wanted to become more skilled. Even if you don't meet any new friends, when you do meet someone you'll be that much more impressive.