Overview:
Learn how the Neighborhood Village Project helps Denver residents build community, meet neighbors and reduce isolation through free cohorts.
What if the key to feeling less isolated in a big city wasn’t moving somewhere new, but knocking on the door next to yours? That’s the question at the heart of the Neighborhood Village Project, a Boulder-based initiative now expanding into Denver that helps residents turn strangers into neighbors and neighbors into real community.
As community manager, Mackenzie Schuller helps guide participants through the project’s free six-month cohorts, where people learn practical and relational tools for building connection right where they live. The model grew out of founder Savannah Kruger’s experiment in her own apartment building, where consistent door-knocking, shared meals and small gatherings gradually transformed a collection of residents into a web of friendships, mutual support and belonging.
In this week’s 5 Questions, Schuller explains how the program works, why Denver’s neighborhoods are especially suited for this kind of effort and what happens when people commit to the simple but vulnerable act of reaching out.
What is the Neighborhood Village Project and why did this get started?
The Neighborhood Village Project (NVP) is an organization that works to reweave the social fabric of the world one neighborhood at a time by guiding and empowering people to cultivate joyful and resilient connections with their neighbors. We run free six-month cohorts where participants receive practical guidance, relational tools, accountability and ongoing support to steward a close-knit neighborhood community where they live. We support our 100+ person network with regular calls, ongoing inspiration and peer support.
Past participants have created childcare networks, painted community murals, launched neighborhood resilience programs, organized wildfire mitigation efforts and built relationships that reduce isolation and unlock collective potential. See our global map of neighborhoods here. Our work straddles the pragmatic and the relational. While we offer straightforward tools for connecting, we also support participants in developing relational skills that infuse their interactions with the possibility of depth.
It all started back in 2022, when NVP’s founder, Savannah Kruger, decided to see if the people in her Boulder apartment building wanted to gather. As a longtime “community person,” she imagined a building of friends running barefoot between each other’s apartments, hanging out, and building things together. She and her partner, Jon, knocked on doors and hosted events and slowly people started getting together organically. A small friend group formed, people showed up for the sweet 91-year-old lady on the fourth floor, and two neighbors fell in love!
A little bit of consistent effort turned strangers into neighbors and neighbors into friends. Savannah wanted a world where everyone could know the belonging, safety and joy that she and her neighbors had. Through her iterative process of building community in her building and learning from other incredible neighborhood community builders like Shani Graham in Perth, Australia, she founded NVP.
Who is behind bringing it to the Denver area and why are we suited for the program?
Our team is based in Boulder, and we’re excited to support our Denver neighbors in deepening community in their backyards! Denver has many characteristics that make it well suited for this work: its mix of residential and commercial zones, diversity of people and abundance of parks and public spaces. These features make it easy for neighbors to walk to the local café together or intentionally gather to support neighborhood businesses. One recent NVP participant in Congress Park discovered a local pub that’s become her neighborhood’s go-to third space.
We want to support neighborhoods in Denver because it’s a big city — and big cities come with a paradox. It feels good to identify with the place you live, but a city’s scale means you’ll never know everyone by name or feel connected to every face you pass. A neighborhood, though, is different. You can know your immediate neighbors. You can build real, caring relationships with them. That sense of being known and connected throughout your day matters deeply for well-being — and we want that for our Denver neighbors.
What do you hope to accomplish through the cohorts?
We follow the aliveness of each participant and what their neighbors want to create. Our goal is to help people create connection where it did not exist before and strengthen connections that are already there. Our curriculum is a mix of sharing what’s worked in other neighborhoods around the world and guiding participants back to what feels right for them and their neighborhood. Some focus on mutual aid, others on emergency resilience and others on gathering for weekly happy hours.
We support people to catalyze connection — because from connection comes trust, and from trust comes the desire to create together. We give participants the skills to come into relationship with their neighbors, the structure and accountability to create momentum in those connections and the philosophy that each neighbor’s vision has a place in what gets co-created.
Through this work, we teach participants to listen for the gifts and dreams of their neighbors, with the understanding that we can always create something more meaningful when we support one another. In a time when loneliness and social isolation are at record highs, this work really matters.
What results are you seeing when people participate?
Every neighborhood’s growth is unique to its residents, and we take a resident-led approach in our program. The results span the spectrum of tangible and emotional. One mother learned through the process of receiving support in a moment of need that she could live in a more interdependent way.
Another woman experienced a shift from holding many negative assumptions about the neighbors she didn’t know to knocking on their doors and finding there was something to appreciate in each person. One father took his daughter door knocking and saw the well of wonder she had about the world that lay behind each new door.
Other participants saw tangible results, like neighbors from across the political spectrum coming together to clear brush around the perimeter of their street to mitigate wildfires. A group of neighbors in Minneapolis is currently organized and protecting their vulnerable neighbors from ICE raids. The results are wide and keep growing as people come together in new and creative ways.
For a firsthand look at what can happen when someone takes the initiative to bring their neighborhood together, check out Ravi’s story in Lafayette, CO told by KUNC reporter Emma VandenEinde (a four-minute read/listen).
For people interested in having more connected neighborhoods, what are some simple things they can do?
We ask people who take NVP to make a practice of stretching their relational comfort zone with their neighbors. At first it starts out small: make eye contact and say hello to your neighbors, offer help to a neighbor and ask a neighbor for help. Then the steps increase in intensity: celebrate a neighbor publicly, share something real you’re struggling with, ask neighbors for help creating an outdoor third space where you all can gather.
These small and big actions, done often, are the building blocks to creating trust and friendship. We’re all creating the culture we live in, and if we want to live in a more connected culture, it starts with the amount of connection we offer and ask for.
In the moments that we choose to be prosocial, connective and curious about our neighbors, we invite them to do the same with us and with the next person that they see. The path towards connection is straightforward, but we know that it can feel lonely to take these steps alone. That’s why the Neighborhood Village Project exists, because it feels better to belong to a community of people crazy enough to want to rebuild the village where they live too.
If you feel called to build lasting community in your neck of the woods, we’d love to have you join us for a future round of the program.