“Community” Isn’t a Perk: What House of Peregrine Is Really Building (with Mickelle Weber)

House Of Peregrine (00:00)

I'm starting to hate the word community and I bet you are too. It's been so overused that it's lost its meaning and we don't even know what it means anymore. Let's get into it. I want to tell you what community means at House of Peregrine and why it matters.

is now used as a marketing tactic. Buy a product, subscribe to a service, and you're told you've joined a community. content, to perks, you've purchased a product, but really, it's only access to the brand's products.

more consumer. Access is beautiful and relevant, but access isn't community. Community isn't a perk you receive. It isn't a vibe. It isn't a funnel. It isn't something you can purchase.

The community, even online, is relational and embodied. People recognize each other. They contribute. There's reciprocity, giving and receiving. It's relationships in motion. And it takes time. It asks you to show up like anything worthwhile does. So, when companies label transactions as community, the word gets diluted and honestly, it makes those of us who are in the heart of real community building cringe.

Because community matters deeply. And when we start calling customers a community, the word loses its meaning entirely and its power.

House of Peregrine, we're not selling belonging. We're a media and product studio creating rituals, products, and tools for thriving abroad, and we want you to join us in that creation. It's for people who are crafting their life story intentionally, and here's why that matters. Changing countries can push people into survival mode and loneliness fast.

When you move to a new country, you don't just lose connection, you lose a whole layer of invisible support you may not have known you were leaning on. Things like cultural defaults, language, institutional fluency, business networks, and also your built-in personal network. Suddenly everything costs more energy, paperwork, timing, housing, relationships, and basic decisions, and yes, building a business. It's very easy to become reactive, isolated, depleted.

And also sometimes it makes people think they need to operate in solo mode and in survival. There's plenty of information out there for the outer journey, like visas, apartment hunting, checklists, school guides, but what's missing, and we know this, is wisdom and wonder for the inner journey that is creating your outer journey. This is the part where your nervous system, your identity, your relationships, and your sense of possibility and identity are changing in real time.

If you treat your move like a logistics project, you can succeed operationally and still not be thriving. You can be living the life of your dreams and you're dying on the inside.

The inner journey isn't optional. It comes with the territory and it's beautiful. And it doesn't only affect you as the person you're locating. It affects everyone in your sphere, including the place you're leaving. Also, the place you're moving is affected. If you arrive dysregulated and isolated, it can lead to more extractive behaviors, disease for you, less capacity to integrate both your inner and outer experiences that are wonderful. And it affects the person you want to become and your relationships with the people around you.

Your internal state ripples outward no matter where you are. And moving countries is a massive shift that people rarely talk about, especially when you're moving somewhere by choice and it's something you were dreaming about. House of Peregrine is infrastructure that brings light to the invisible layers that show up when you leave a one country system while keeping one very important ingredient intact. There's a magic and wonder to living abroad.

the expansion of perspective, the unlikely friendships, the way your life gets bigger when you follow your inner knowing. You don't have to go it alone and many of us bring invaluable advice and information and want to, to those who are doing the same. A lot of people move abroad and start a blog or an Instagram account. That is one way to do it. That's beautiful and content has changed people's lives in meaningful ways. the content is just the surface of what's possible.

At House of Peregrine, we help people bring their genius into the world through software, media, and physical products on a network that is designed for international life with others who get it.

This looks like having way more options than starting a blog or an Instagram or Facebook group. This can look like taking an idea and turning it into software, testing it with our members and help marking it based on the niche you have with people who get it. It can look like creating a podcast, a book, a physical product or a community local to a city or designed for worldwide relevance. This is helping members become thought leaders through our network of international players.

And yes, this is where I'll use the word community.

is something that is central to what you're doing at House of Peregrine and something we are cultivating with care and respect brought about by thoughtful human-centric infrastructure and deep insights from those who have been there. Because community isn't something you get for buying something. It's what happens when people bring their gifts to the table and heartbeats to the table and amplify them. They stop building inside silos and stop being in survival mode.

and start building and creating in community. So if you're tired of hearing that community is something you join by purchasing, consider this instead. Community is a human amplification and thriving technology that is as old as time. And when you're creating your life intentionally, especially abroad, having it changes everything.

is a particular kind of power when this worldwide network is able to find one another and create. It is a playground for creation that has the potential to change the world in incredible and generative ways.

House Of Peregrine (06:32)

That's the kind of community we're building at House of Peregrine. I hope you'll join us at HouseofPeregrine.com and I would love to hear in the comments what you think about community. Are you tired of hearing it used this way? And how can we redefine it together?