One of the guilds I belonged to was good at the mentoring and "outreach" sort of things. We all have different talents and skills, I'm easy going with both beginning quilters and people I don't know so if they needed to find someone at the last minute, it was often me. And from there, I could lead people to someone else so if your main interest is in heirloom sewing, maybe my friend Lynnae over here would be someone for you to meet. The guild also required that you work the show, and one meeting a year (we were large). Working the meeting could be setting it up and starting the coffee, or the take down, or the front door which was a greeting position. We were also required to wear our name badges to meetings, that did help and while we had a standard pattern for the badge, the fabrics were our own and people also added in some techniques and that helps say something.
We had one guild leader who was just a lot of fun, she was also an early childhood specialist and I think used some of her same techniques on both her unruly children and unruly guild. More than once (and it was to mix up people) she had variations on "seat bingo" where we took a button from a jar, and had small group activities based on the color of button we picked. So say there were 4 stations demonstrating something, yellow over here, red, over here, and blue over there. I was always just fine, but yes, some of the people didn't want to break up their visiting.
I found it really hard to get into small group for group projects, part of that is I do prefer to press my seams open but I would do the other way if I had to. Getting into a small group that meets your personal needs is hard, and back then I was a working single mother and really all I had available was the weekends or evenings. What I found was almost all of the people who came to the guild monthly sewalongs/free workshops/donation things were like me and didn't have a small group to belong to for whatever reasons plus those amazing regulars who do everything and anything and are a marvel to behold!
Some of us due to schedules or life situations or whatever can't always attend things at particular points. When I was a working single mother and my son was old enough, I could do evenings after work but I didn't want to do that too often. Otherwise I only had weekends. Now that I'm not working but my vision is going bad, I can't drive at night so I can do days but not nights.
That's the long way of suggesting having some activity with a common purpose, like a donation project, on a weekend if your usual time is weekdays, or evening if you are usually days and see who comes.
Once people meet a bit, they mix a bit more. We as guild members need to do our part in terms of part of being good members. If there is someone you really to love to visit with but only see them at guild, go ahead and see if maybe there is another time the two (or however many) of you can get together. Some people though, they want to belong to a club and to them that means "exclusive". I'm the inclusive type, quilters come in all styles of art and life and are typically some pretty wonderful people.