2020 was an insane year.
2020 was an insane year, but you already knew that. Below we highlight how the Neighboring Movement survived the craziest year ever. If you’d like to help us close out this year and move full steam into the next one we’d love your help with a donation! Thank you for supporting the Neighboring Movement.
8 Front Doors: The 8 Front Door Project is an initiative to encourage people in our neighborhood to know the neighbors who live in the homes closest to them; the 8 front doors closest to their own. Covid put some major delays on this initiative, but we used the time to improve our plan and we are hopeful to roll it out in 2021
2020 Achievements: we interviewed John McKnight, who discovered ABCD to vet our plan for the 8 Front Doors, we interviewed neighbors to get their input on our plan, we worked with two professors of social work at Wichita State University to develop a tool to measure community impact of the project.
Good Neighbor Experiment (GNE): In 2020 we converted our GNE cohorts to online. While this isn’t the ideal version of the learning cohort, it worked better than we had hoped and will continue to be a useful option moving forward. We also partnered with the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund and were awarded just under $1 million dollars as part of the Thriving Congregations Initiative from the Lilly Endowment. The grant will allow us to expand this work across the nation over the next 5 years.
2020 Achievements: We completed a cohort of churches and started another one. A total of 18 churches participated in a GNE cohort in 2020. Nearly 100 people were on their church’s neighboring leadership team, and nearly 200 participated in at least 6 weeks of our small group curriculum.
Kansas Animator Network: With help from RuralOrganizing.org we organized a cohort of 11 Kansans who were trained in community organizing and commissioned to do work in their small towns and local communities. The cohort was so successful that the Rural Democracy Initiative funded the program for another year with enough funds to add a full staff member to oversee the project.
2020 Achievements: we recruited our first learning cohort which met for 4 months online, each cohort member received 6 hours of individual coaching, each cohort member submitted a community action plan, several projects were initiated as part of the cohort.
Faith In Democracy: The Neighboring Movement partnered with The Voter Network to expand voting access in Kansas to low propensity voters using an online peer-to-peer tool. We used our church network to recruit volunteers into this non-partisan effort.
2020 Achievements: We wrote a four-week worship series for the churches and supported more than 100 volunteers who encouraged around 1800 voters to make a voting plan.
The Julian Way: We were approached over the summer by Rev. Justin Hancock about being an umbrella organization for the Julian Way. The Julian Way is an organization focused on education and empowerment with, for, and by, persons of diverse embodiments. They seek to help places of faith, and other cultural institutions, achieve greater universal accessibility, by fostering environments where persons of all embodiments can work for leadership and equity throughout the whole of human life together.