Hi Rachel, Unfortunately Facebook is the Groups only method of communicating with other members and their videos and files sections that contain a lot of the research information. I'm not a big fan of Facebook but I try to avoid all of garbage on it and am a little selective on adding friends. If you don't have a Facebook account, you could create one specifically to join the group and then lock down the security privace settings.

How to Lock Down Your Facebook Privacy Settings
-- https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/facebook-privacy-settings

John