Black family reunions

The reunion is a tradition.
Give it the tools it deserves.

Your family reunion is not a picnic. It is an institution. It has a committee, a rotation, a cookout that people fly across the country for, and a matriarch whose name holds it all together. Grove was built for exactly that kind of gathering.

Start your reunion

The committee does the real work.
Grove gives it a real system.

Most long-running family reunions run on a committee. There is someone handling the money, someone booking the park, someone coordinating the t-shirts, and someone making sure the elders have shade and chairs. But most of the time, the committee is operating on group texts and handwritten lists. Grove gives the committee a shared workspace where tasks are assigned, the budget is tracked, and nothing falls through the cracks because somebody changed their phone number.

Role assignments

Food, activities, finance, registration. Set up committees and assign tasks so everyone knows their lane and the work stays balanced.

Shared task board

Every task has an owner and a deadline. The committee sees what is done and what is still open without asking in the group chat.

Budget tracking

Card payments and recorded Zelle, Cash App, and cash land in one place, and expenses are tracked by category. No guesswork.

Your family has branches. Grove knows that.

The Williams side. The Jackson line. Grandma Lucille's people. Black family reunions are organized by branches, and those branches are how the cookout is staffed, how the t-shirts get ordered, and how the family Olympics teams are drawn. Grove lets you define your branches once, and everything else follows: RSVP counts by branch, communication channels for each side, and a running record of who belongs where.

Branch RSVP tracking

See the households that said yes, branch by branch. The Atlanta side has 14 households confirmed. The Chicago line has 5 and counting.

Branch channels

Each branch gets its own space to coordinate. The Houston crew can organize their carpool without flooding the main thread.

Family Olympics on the schedule

Put tug-of-war, trivia and relay races on the schedule, plus the spades tournament, so every branch knows when to show up ready.

T-shirt sizes at RSVP

Each household picks a shirt size when they RSVP, and the sizes export with the roster so the t-shirt coordinator can place the order. No more guessing.

The cookout is not optional.
The potluck board keeps it covered.

Somebody is bringing the ribs. Somebody else has the banana pudding. Aunt Deb always does the potato salad. But without a system, you end up with six trays of baked beans and no cups. Grove's potluck board lets people claim what they are bringing, organized by ready-made categories. The food coordinator sees the full picture and can fill the gaps before the reunion, not during it.

The matriarch started this.
Her story should live somewhere permanent.

In a lot of Black families, the reunion exists because one person decided to hold the family together. She picked the park. She kept the phone tree. She cooked for 80 people and made it look easy. When that person is gone, the family feels it. Grove's memory archive and Ask an Elder let you capture those voices while they are still here. Ask the matriarch how the reunion started and hear the answer in her voice. Upload the photos from 1987. Import your family tree so the names of the people who came before are honored at the reunion.

Voice stories

Ask a question and she answers by voice from her phone. Big Mama telling the family origin story in her own words, not someone else's summary.

In Memoriam

Choose relatives from your imported family tree to honor In Memoriam at the reunion. Their names are shown during the reunion and kept for every year after.

The family historian

Every family has one. Give them a real archive to work with instead of a shoebox of photos and a spiral notebook.

From Mississippi to Chicago to everywhere else.

A lot of Black family reunions are rooted in the Great Migration. The family left the South, scattered across the country, and the reunion became the one time a year everyone came back together. Grove's branch structure mirrors that history. You can name branches for the cities they settled in and see how the branches formed along the way. The reunion is not just a party. It is a homecoming. And the tools should understand that.

Yes, there is a t-shirt. And it matters.

The family reunion t-shirt is not merch. It is a marker. It says you were there. It says you belong. Grove lets you collect a shirt size for each household at registration and export the sizes with the roster, and your committee can coordinate the design in the family feed. The t-shirt coordinator has a clean list before going to print.

The reunion starts at church. Grove gets that.

For many families, the reunion weekend begins with a Sunday service. The family fills a whole section. There is a program, a family prayer, and sometimes a memorial moment for those who passed since the last gathering. Grove's schedule builder lets you block out the service, the cookout, the family meeting, and the activities so everyone knows where to be and when. The day-of page keeps the whole weekend on track.

After the reunion, the record lives on.

How many came. The moments, the shoutouts, and the reunion's photos. The organizer publishes it as a Capsule and emails it to everyone who RSVP'd yes, and it stays in Grove for the family to revisit any time. Family members who sign in see the photos in the Capsule; the public reunion page shows only the photos that were on the public photo wall. Next year's committee gets the tasks, the budget categories, and a handoff brief with the lessons learned. The family historian gets a real archive. And the next generation gets proof that this family shows up for each other, every single year.

Your family reunion is bigger than a group chat.

Free to start. No credit card. Set up the committee, the branches, and the cookout in under ten minutes.