Start a Local Tarot Club!

I recently started up a tarot club with the help of a local coffee shop, and it has been a wonderful way to connect with others and expand my own practice. It's something I wanted to do for a long time and only recently got around to starting. At first, I thought I had to have something highly structured and exciting, and that it would only be successful if I had a dozen or more people each time. I'm finding, though, that our loose, small group is deeply satisfying.

If you're interested in cultivating a local community of tarot readers, but you're not sure where to start or think you aren't "advanced" enough to organize a meeting, don't worry! I'm here to share the structure and origin story of our tarot club to help get you started.

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1. The Prep Work: Location, Time, & Publicity

If possible, find a place that will partner with you and let you announce club meetings on their social media. I approached my local coffee shop because they were used to seeing me there and I knew they were interested in creating a welcoming, creative space. You'll want a public space that is as accessible as possible and doesn't require people to spend money (or at least not very much). Our club meets once a month, and it's posted on my blog's social media as well as the social media of the coffeeshop. Include the time and place, but also a sentence or two about the purpose of the club. It was important to me that our tarot club be open to everybody from experts, beginners, and skeptics, but you can decide what tone you want to set for your community.

2. The Structure

When I started planning our tarot club, I thought I had to have a unique theme and activities for each session, plus exciting new educational material for people. Fortunately, I was extremely wrong. Since I technically initiated the club, folks did look to me for structure, but I ended up keeping it simple.

We start each meeting by going around in a circle and introducing ourselves and briefly describing how and why we read tarot; this is useful because we are a drop in group and there are new people each week.  Of course, we read cards, too: Every person pulls three cards for the person to their left and interprets them while the group observes. After the reader finishes their interpretation, the querent and group members describe what they learned and what they have to add. Just the intros and this simple activity fill up an hour or two quite easily, especially if you factor in all the time we spend drooling over each others' decks!

This structure ended up being really great; since the personalities in our group are very supportive, it turns into a really empowering experience that pushes us to interpret the cards in new ways. It also gives new readers a chance to hear different ways of interpreting, showing them that there isn't one correct way to read the cards.

3. The Follow Up

My tarot club is pretty low-maintenance. I keep up with my social media and try to respond in a timely manner when club members contact me, or when people reach out with questions about us. I announce our meetings ahead of time, and I also try to drop in and do some donation-based readings at the coffeeshop just to keep the tarot presence active. Additionally--and this is important--I do my best to support the venue in other ways. Our coffee shop supports us by hosting us and publicizing us, so I also make sure to promote other events that they offer. We're lucky because our coffee shop is the kind of place I want to promote anyway--that's why I picked them!

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Cultivating a local tarot community is enriching and empowering. A tarot club is a relatively simple way to do it; would this approach work where you live? How would you change the structure? Would there be a benefit to restricting it to advanced practitioners? Please share your thoughts in comments!