52 Weeks of Neighboring - Week 6

March 22, 2020 Kristopher Swanson

Neighboring Tip of the Week - Ask your neighbors for their contact information.

Hello friends! Happy Spring!

Over the next few weeks, we plan to present neighboring tips that we hope will encourage you to continue fostering relationships with your neighbors in the midst of the pandemic we are all experiencing. We believe that getting to know the people who live closest to us is both a simple and a radical thing. Perhaps doing so in the midst of a global pandemic seems more radical now than ever, yet we believe that, right now, there are countless simple ways that we can be good neighbors. We know that these relationships impact our lives in the most powerful of ways, and that power might be displayed more now, in March of 2020, than it ever has before.

So, the neighboring experiment that we propose for this fourth week of March is to ask your neighbors for their contact information. It seems that there has never been a better time to ask your neighbors for their contact information than right now, so we encourage you to do so!

We will leave the scale of this tip up to you (whether this be the neighbors behind the 8 front doors closest to your own, the neighbors on your street, the neighbors on your block, etc.), but we encourage you to ask any neighbors that you do not already have contact information for if they would be willing to share this with you. There are a few different ways you can do this while keeping social distancing in mind. Perhaps you knock on your neighbor’s door and then walk a good distance away so that you can have a face-to-face interaction but at a distance. Perhaps you leave a note on their door. The note can be simple, too! “Hello, my name is Ernie Macmillan, and I live a couple houses down from you. In the midst of this pandemic, I want to make sure our neighbors stay connected, and I realized that I don’t have your contact information. Is there any way you would be willing to share this with me? Here is my number, and please feel free to call anytime! Thank you!” That’s all there is to it. If you want to take this experiment a bit further, perhaps you can even ask your neighbors if they are willing to have their contact information shared with other neighbors, and if so, you can then craft sheets or booklets with the information for each of your neighbors and give one to every neighbor. However this looks for you, we encourage you to ask your neighbors for their contact information. We think gathering this contact information is one of the best first steps to take in order to continue connecting with your neighbors in the midst of this pandemic.

We believe everyone, at any time, can neighbor, and that goes for right now, too! Let’s commit to being good neighbors in the time of coronavirus. We truly are all in this together; everyone is experiencing this impact. Let’s choose to journey with our neighbors. Right here, right now.

Happy neighboring!

P.S. We release a new episode of our podcast, The Neighbor Next Door, every Tuesday, and for this week’s episode, we will present a more general neighboring tip that includes a bunch of different ideas for good neighboring in the time of coronavirus. Tune in to Tuesday’s episode on any podcast medium! Here are some of the most popular ways to listen...