GoodThings PHL Member Meetup
YOWIE Shop
226 South St.
Philadelphia
March 4, 2026
Philadelphia has always felt like a small town to me. Everyone is, at most, two degrees of separation away from knowing each other, I run into someone I know just about every time I leave the house, and it has never felt like there was an overwhelming number of things to do on a given day. That is, until I stumbled upon GoodThings PHL, a community group working to help folks find friends and things to do.
On Wednesday night, I made my way to Yowie on South Street to attend GT’s membership meetup. The group’s creator, Kelsey McKee, excitedly greeted me at the door, making sure everyone who entered felt welcomed. McKee started the group in 2020, but really started to focus on it after she left her tech job a few years after. Now, GoodThings is McKee’s full-time job. “It takes an unemployed person to do this,” she told me.
The event at Yowie was the perfect aesthetic, mostly thanks to the fact that Yowie itself is one of the best curated spaces you’ll walk into on South Street. There was soft lighting, space to move around, and the speakers were bumping songs from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and various DJ tracks. Forin also stayed open to provide the event's attendees with coffee, wine, and seltzer.
This gathering in particular had a few specific goals: making a map of your 2026 Philly bucket list, promoting the goods at Yowie, finding new friends, and learning how to make the most out of a GT membership (a.k.a. Joining The Club).
The Club, as McKee explained to the small group, has many perks. For between $5-9 a month, Club members can join meetups, create their own Clubs, and submit receipts after shopping at small businesses to accrue rewards like event tickets, food, workshops, and more. Soon, there will be a chat feature where folks can share things like meetups, jobs, and apartments. Really, McKee is trying to create a community platform outside of the grip that Instagram has on all of us. The monthly fee goes to helping that become a reality.
Turnout for this specific GT event was small—around eight people lingered around the space—but it felt like an intimate meetup where folks there could really connect. It was neat to see the bucket lists other people had versus my own, which primarily focused on places I wanted to eat (Tu Rinconcito) or drink coffee (Herman’s, Coqui Cult) this year. One attendee noted that they’d like to try out the photobooth at Bodie, and another person wrote that they plan to visit The Barbary. McKee noted that her bucket list mostly consisted of things to do outside, like riding a bike on the Schuylkill River Trail or attending Parks on Tap at Clark Park.
After filling out my map, my night was dedicated to yapping with the other people at the event. I got to see someone’s fresh-off-the-printer quarterly zine called Collide and chat about how we’re handling getting ourselves to do things amidst cold, dreary weather and the severe depression that comes along with, you know, the state of the world. We all agreed, it’s not so easy to get yourself to a social event when you know your tax dollars are being used to violence at home and abroad. However, we also agreed that now is the time to continue gathering, meeting new people, and working together, even if it’s hard. And that’s where GoodThings comes in, to help Philadelphians find those people and spaces to make sense of it all. Or to tear it all down. Your pick.
