A Neighborhood of Needs
Your stories of building up community
A few weeks ago, I asked about your own tools for conviviality, for making bigger asks and forging deeper friendships with your neighbors.
After posting, I had two back to back weeks of work travel (with baby in tow) where my 10 month old son was the reason I came to know strangers better. I’m plainly in need of some help, whether it’s hoisting luggage or an extra person to play peekaboo. People are attracted to him and then wind up telling me a great deal about themselves.
It’s a reminder to me about how ready people are to make a connection, if they just have a ready excuse.
The Symphony has a good story about being the first one to go beyond distant politeness:
I chat with the dog walkers I see regularly, and after about a year (as an American living in Canada - I am *outgoing* - a year seems like an appropriate wait time, but on the inside it feels 11 months too long. ), I will say something like, "I see you all the time and I should know your name, I'm Sarah"....and then we have more and more chats as time marches on and we see each other. It's the first bridge, and I've met so many people this way and it's relatively low stakes - we KNOW we see each other all the time, but the cordial "morning" never goes anywhere until I make the first move. I've never had anyone else do it for me.
Now I know my friend Sarah (who also works at our grocery store), the runner, Mike, whose dog gets along famously with mine, and on and on. If I see kids outside playing (we have a new family of little kids nearby!) I will introduce myself to mom or dad, show them where I live, tell them about my kids (babysitting age), and gift them a plate of Christmas cookies. These things feel *so small* to me - but I grew up on a super well-connected neighborhood street that I realize was sort of the American ideal. Now, when I tell people (here) about my neighborhood, they say they've *never* lived in a place where neighbors chat to each other. It blows my mind! It took me YEARS to get baby steps with these people. LOL
Just this year, we asked a little girl (10) who lives a few houses down - who also has a dog - if she'd be interested in making some money and taking our dog on a bathroom break and feeding him dinner while we're away skiing on a very long day. She was THRILLED! She took it so seriously, we had them over for an hour so she could ask questions, get to know our dog, learn how our lock worked with a key we'd give her, etc. Now - she was very quiet and reserved before - she'll wave and walk over and talk to us - mom, too.
I’m a big fan of
, a substack on co-living experiments and deeper community, and I enjoyed their recent “Stoop Coffee” story.
Their experiment in openness to their neighbors began with improvising a stoop:
Tyler and I were already having leisurely weekend morning coffees in our house, so it was an easy pivot to sit outside with our coffees and enjoy the sunshine. And thus our tradition began. Every weekend, we would bring our folding chairs out onto the street – we had to make do since our house doesn’t have a stoop – and enjoy our caffeine. As we saw people entering or exiting their homes, we'd enthusiastically wave them down, introduce ourselves, and write down their names in our shared spreadsheet. I wore a goofy tie-dyed Six Flags hat so people would remember us as “those people” and we started calling this our brand awareness campaign (but of course, we live in SF).
And from there… they grew!
I recommend the whole story, and the ways they helped connect their neighbors until it was no longer just their project.
And you shared stories of your own on the full blossoming of hospitality, including the one that Kate describes here:
We've hosted an open invite dinner most weeks (always paper plates) for over eight years now. It started with just a friend or two coming over after work and before Bible study, now our last dinner had over thirty adults and ten kids!
Our dinners have been one place (among several in our area) where people have made friends and community has grown. People have found new friends, housemates, coworkers, and even gotten married and converted, from the Holy Spirit working through our regular dinners. The way we think is, God is lending us this house and will ask what we did with it to build the Kingdom!
Because of this growing community, especially friends who have chosen to live within the same neighborhood in the last few years, I've been able to call on friends for favors, from last minute child care, to last minute staying at my house with the dishwasher repair man while I did school pickup, to this week- asking if a friend could check my mail while I was out of town. It's a great life!
It can take surprisingly little to make a community. What you need is:
A space/event that repeats
A way to make it visible to people you don’t yet know
A norm of praying together (or another way to prompt people to share their needs)
As the weather turns (allegedly, it’s just above freezing here), what’s one thing you’d like to try in the next month?
I'm an inveterate local-community builder (one who has, by the way, benefited from your practical advice in "Building the Benedict Option"!), and I have a rather bespoke question for the community — how might one take advantage of the first month or two of *moving into* a new neighborhood to meet one's neighbors?
(The context of this is that my wife and I are buying our first house, and don't want to waste the opportunity. We have two teens and one baby. Our specific neighborhood is a rather small, a loop of about 80 houses, and it seems possible to actually learn most of the people's names. Oh, and we're open to entirely oddball ideas!)
This is a fascinating post to me because it is both wrong in my experience and observation, and I suspect that my view is very gendered. You don't need to prompt people to share needs if they're getting together for a shared project of some sort. Whether it's a political project, an art project, historical recreation, or a particularly intense and all-consuming workplace, sharing needs comes naturally out of having a shared task or goal that you are committed to, to the other extent those needs interfere with the project. And yet I still feel in the places I am thinking of it is the working together, trade, and assistance, not the vulnerability, that creates community.