“We’ve gone from saying a good neighbor is someone who invites us over for dinner to someone who leaves us alone,” David says.

David is the editor of one of our favorite resources, the Engaged Neighbor newsletter, from the University of Missouri Extension. In 2022, 2024, and 2026 MU Extension ran the State of Neighboring in Missouri survey, hearing from 2,000 adults across the state.

But David is quick to say that this number is only part of the picture. Missourians want their privacy, but they aren’t looking to be isolated. Seventy percent greet their neighbors regularly and 61.5% would prefer more meaningful connections beyond just a casual wave hello. You can read more about it in his latest blog.

We wanted to see if the data held up across the country. For its 2025 American Neighbor Survey, the Survey Center on American Life asked 5,357 adults a similar question. Like Missourians, 65% said being a good neighbor is more about not getting too involved in your neighbors’ personal affairs.

Some folks take that to heart and keep their distance. Almost half of adults (48%) didn’t spend a single social evening with a neighbor in the past year. And 59% never worked with a neighbor to fix a problem in their community.

The national numbers look bad for folks who want to be more connected to their neighbors. So, should we give up and leave people alone? Not really.

Just like in Missouri, the national data shows a more nuanced picture. The same survey found that 88% of adults say it’s important to live in a place where people look out for each other.

So, what can you take from all this? Folks value their space, but they’re also looking for a chance to connect and support each other. So reach out to your neighbors. As David stated in his blog: “Being an engaged neighbor doesn’t mean being in everyone’s business. It means knowing enough about the people around you to notice, care and help when needed.”

If you see them around, invite them over and find something to do together. Or try inviting them with a flyer to a casual gathering (hint: you can use the new flyer tool in Plurality). It’s a low-pressure way to say hi, and it lets your neighbors decide if they want to show up.

That’s how David started in his own neighborhood. He invited the men on his street to have coffee in his garage every Friday morning before work. He started reaching out to them by handing out flyers door to door. It took a while. He set up the coffee and chairs three or four times before anyone came. Three years later, about 10 neighbors show up regularly. They’ve organized barbecues, gone to basketball games together, and done service projects in the neighborhood.

You can read more and start your own by trying David’s Blueprint.

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He attributes several reasons for why people stopped hosting, but essentially argues that it’s because it can feel too hard, when other options seem so easy. He writes: “Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. It requires matching schedules, cleaning the house, buying food, accommodating children and allergies, tolerating awkwardness, and taking the risk that the evening is mediocre. By contrast, what does television ask of us? Nothing. TikTok? Even less.”

The thing is, people do want connection. They want to build meaningful friendships and to feel like they belong to their neighborhood. And despite how easy it might be to find distraction with digital alternatives, there is a reason why so many of us use words like “brain rot” and “doomscrolling” to refer to our time spent there.

We have a different theory than Thompson. For many folks, all that is missing is an invitation. And it doesn’t need to be too complicated. It can start with a piece of paper inviting your neighbors in.

A while ago, we talked with a friend who runs a community program in Colorado Springs. She told us about how when she moved to her neighborhood, she didn’t know a single person for the first six months. She started reaching out slowly to folks, organizing events with neighbors. But the thing that really made a difference was a flyer.

She did a simple design with an invitation to a cornhole tournament. She went door to door, placing it on her neighbors’ doorknobs or giving it to them directly. There wasn’t much to it. It was a simple invitation with no expectation other than telling “I live near you, and I’d like to know you.”

She says it worked wonderfully. Dozens of families came to the event.

We haven’t stopped thinking about that story because maybe it is as simple as sharing a piece of paper. Screens can hold your attention, but a flyer on your own door, that you can hold and touch, feels different. It feels more special because you discovered something in the real world or someone took the time to walk up and reach out to you. You notice it because it’s right there, in the place you already are, from someone who is clearly close by. It’s something that we’ve lost with social media.

A community calendar in Point Reyes, CA.

We wanted to bring some of that magic to Plurality. When you create an event with us, you can now print a flyer for it. We hope it’s something you’ll want to take outside: tape it to a lamppost, pin it to the community board in the library, or slip it under a few doors on your street.

We built it because we don’t want to be an app that pulls you away from where you are. We want to support the real, slightly messy, hands-on work of getting to know the people around you. Technology can be great at connecting people, but only if it sends you back out into the world rather than keeping you in it.

If you’ve ever felt like you can’t change much about the place you live, we get it. But we’ve seen that it often starts small, often with a printed flyer. A neighbor stops to read it, and maybe they come. Then someone brings a friend. After that, the block feels a little more like yours.

So the next time you create an event, don’t leave it on the screen. Print the poster and share it outside. Put it where your neighbors will see it and let them in.

A printable flyer is generated automatically after you create your event in Plurality.

When the pandemic began and Vince was stuck at home in his San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood with his two young daughters and needed a way to get them out of the house, he knew what to do. He bought a couple of trash grabbers and they started picking up litter around the neighborhood, starting in the street by Safeway. “Within a couple weeks, you could see a difference,” he says.

He started inviting other friends and neighbors to join them. Folks spread the word to other friends and shared resources to help him out. Someone told him about the city’s Department of Public Works, which handed supplies like visibility vests and trash grabbers through its adopt-a-street program. He saw it as an opportunity to invite even more folks to join. He posted an open call online and of the dozen people who showed up, half were strangers. Then he teamed up with another neighbor who’d been leading other cleanups and a hundred people came.

To keep the momentum going, he formed an organization called Refuse Refuse and runs it full-time. “We have a neighborhood cleanup in pretty much every neighborhood in San Francisco, at least once a month. Definitely every zip code.” That’s 30 to 50 cleanups a week, with 500 to 700 volunteers showing up between them.

Vince says that organizing a clean up is fairly straight forward. Someone is designated as a captain and they arrive with gloves, bags, grabbers, and safety vests, give a quick intro, and send folks out in groups. Folks from all ages come to the trash pick ups, including families with small children.

He gives the same safety warning to everyone who comes: “The street is lava. Don’t step out into the street to pick anything up.” Whenever they find needles, sharp glass, or “anything that’s a little questionable,” they leave it to the professionals by reporting it to the city’s 311 line instead. An hour or two later everyone meets back, ties up the bags, and the city hauls them away.

Then comes what Vince calls the secret sauce that builds community: sticking around. He invites cafes and bakeries to donate coffee and baked goods, and volunteers linger and talk. At the Fillmore South cleanup, “the regulars there have become great friends. They even have a Slack group. They go to baseball games together, they go on hikes, they have a yearly picnic,” he says.

Vince knows volunteering intimidates people as it can involve too much of a commitment, especially for those with busy schedules and little free time. But clean ups are casual and easy. “With cleanups, it’s like: you check the schedule, find one that fits, show up, and know what to do.” And most important: you get to see the impact immediately. “This block was dirty, and we went in and cleaned it, and now look at it. It’s nice for everybody.”

The other thing a cleanup fixes is harder to see. “It can feel like everyone’s strangers in the city. We don’t really get to know the people around us, even though we’re surrounded by people,” he says. He has a term for it: urban anonymity. The clean ups create a space to build connections that eventually turn into the deep relationships that build community. Over the years, he’s built many new friendships, younger and older, from all over the city.

Vince figures that if enough people keep showing up, “at some point it’ll just be the culture here, and it’ll kind of snowball.” He’s still chasing that tipping point. “Whatever it gets to, it’s already cleaner than it was before.”

Do you want to do a Refuse Refuse clean up in your neighborhood?

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Photo credit: Sara Code Kroll

She told me about one she had been running for several years now out of her art studio in Lancaster, PA. For a month every year, she decorates the front window that looks into North Pine Street with colorful paper and leaves only a small peephole uncovered with an invitation for folks to look inside.

When you do, you’ll find a different neighbor each day doing some form of art. They might be playing the violin, performing a monologue from their favorite play, or cooking a family recipe. Neighbors sign-up and can do whatever they want in the space with a few guidelines to keep it clean and neighborly. She calls it the Art Peep Show and has become a beloved annual tradition.

It all started as an experiment to get neighbors talking and learning about each other, Libby says. “A lot of people when they are out in the world feel isolated and don’t feel comfortable starting a conversation or engaging with someone, even if they are their next-door neighbor,” she says. “The whole idea is to get people to start conversations, so that as you walk by a neighbor you can stop them and say, ‘I saw you at the Art Peep Show!’”

The Art Peep Show is only one of the many other creative projects that Libby is doing to bring neighbors together in her city. All of them share a similar trait: they start from an unexpected place and give you a new reason to start a conversation or deepen a relationship with one of your neighbors.

Another one of my favorites, Truth or Drawer, is a game you can play in one evening. If you pick Truth, a person in a gorilla suit walks to you with a silver tray carrying a postcard with a truth about life like: “In spite of your interior self, people will make judgments based on your appearance.” You sit down, contemplate it, and hold on to the card for the rest of the evening. Libby says that folks naturally start having conversations with others about their own card or another they heard. If instead you pick Drawer, you walk to an old library card catalogue and pull on one of the drawers. Inside, you’ll find a challenge of kindness, like writing a postcard to a neighbor you don’t know or drawing a portrait of a friend.

After listening to all of these amazingly creative projects I was left with two questions: 1) how does Libby come up with such brilliant ideas? 2) What would folks need to replicate them in their own communities?

Adam and I have been noodling a lot with the second question. It’s been at the center of why we built Plurality in the first place. We know most folks are looking for connection and belonging, and want to do something meaningful to address needs in their communities. Even in our heated political environment, according to the Connection Opportunity survey, 74% of Americans are willing to work across all forms of divides (religious, socioeconomic, political, and racial) to tackle a shared goal with their neighbors.

But we also see the opposite happening. It feels like less folks are actually showing up for each other in their communities. Social clubs and other social institutions where we used to connect are disappearing. According to Pew Research Center, we are now more likely to see our neighbors as immoral and lacking ethics than the opposite, the highest percentage of 25 nations surveyed. And 63% of Americans have never taken action with neighbors and 72% only leave their house to get together with people they care about twice or less a month.

We started Plurality to help bridge that gap. We are actively listening to folks to figure out what blocks them from starting something new where they live, what they need to grow an existing initiative, and what they need to make it more sustainable in the long term.

One of the main barriers we’ve heard is that life gets busy and folks don’t have the bandwidth to come up with something new and fun to try with friends and neighbors. They might have a free evening once every other month, but not more than that. And that is where our Blueprints come in.

Blueprints are event templates of tried and tested ideas to bring neighbors together from people all over the world. You browse a few tiles with titles and a small description, get a short story about a great idea, with clear instructions on what you need to do, and an easy format that will help you organize an event within minutes.

The main goal of the Blueprints is to give folks agency to start building community. We take care of some of the work and give you the tools to get started, but you are leading the charge. When you set an event based on Blueprint, we invite you to adapt it however you see fit. And the Blueprint creator can even learn from your innovations, so the ideas keep evolving.

There are three Blueprints created by Libby Modern in the platform, out of 30 currently available in the library. Most come from stories that were in the public domain. A few are from projects that had a ton of impact in their time, but the organization that started it has ceased to exist, and we honor their legacy with the Blueprint.

For Libby, the reason she created the Blueprints in Plurality is simple: it helped her reach more people faster and more efficiently. “People contact me a lot and say, ‘Hey, we want to do this project here.’ And I’m so happy. But then I give all this time to them, telling them how to do it, which I’m happy to do. But if I were doing that all the time, it’s just not sustainable. It would be so nice to just say, go to Plurality,” she says. “And I’d love to see new ideas from other creatives and learn from them. To have a clearinghouse where everything is would be amazing.”

Ready to try a Blueprint or submit one?

So, he built an infrastructure to support them. He brought neighbors, teachers, and mentors to guide and uplift them. His kids are thriving and almost all of them are finishing high school and going to further education. Yet, even with such a great story and track record of change, Haneef struggles to get enough funds to address the needs of his community.

I spent years working at large national organizations where I helped create some of their big projects. I don’t think anything I did there had nearly the transformative impact Haneef has had in his own zip code. But here’s the unfair part: my team had the infrastructure to fundraise 50x times more money than Haneef could.

National organizations have development teams, surveys, and evaluation budgets. They can stand in front of a funder and say: we’re doing systemic change at scale, and show the charts to back it up. Haneef knows his impact is there. He just can’t hand it to a funder in a format that resonates with them.

This gap is getting wider. Funders have shifted toward funding systems change, but as research from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, it’s not all equitable. Funds tend to follow organizations that can narrate change at scale and have established long-lasting relationships with funders.

Meanwhile, every community builder we’ve met already knows their efforts are deeply changing things. If you want to talk about systems change, which Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors defines as tackling the underlying conditions—mindsets, structures, relationships, and policies—that hold a problem in place, rather than treating symptoms, look no further than potlucks, book clubs, or youth ministries.

Folks who organize these gatherings know firsthand the transformation happening in front of them. You see folks who keep showing up, conversations that spill past the end of the event, and friendships that get built. But when you’re hauling folding tables and greeting neighbors at the door, you don’t have a spare hand to take photos, collect surveys, or track attendance. So the proof evaporates, and with it goes the case for new neighbors, city support, and foundation dollars.

That’s why we believe everyone who organizes a gathering – from a club to a local organization to a neighborhood association – needs an impact dashboard. And it’s why we built one into Plurality.

It starts with knowing who actually showed up. Plurality checks folks in automatically when they arrive within the geographic area of your event. Organizers can also print a QR code that checks people in when they scan it, and a quick dashboard lets you add anyone who has not RSVP’d. Over time you see how many faces are new and how many keep coming back, which is the difference between guessing at your retention and knowing it.

Then there are the moments of connection you didn’t see. When folks upload Moments, whether photos or a few sentences, they all land in your dashboard. We’re building a tool that connects those Moments into a narrative of your impact, one you can download monthly or quarterly and hand to your stakeholders.

The most powerful piece is seeing the ripples. The dashboard shows how many people built connections with each other on the platform, how many went on to start their own events after attending yours, and how many asked for a repeat. If your potluck sparks a community clean-up because of a conversation two neighbors had over BBQ, that thread is now visible. You can look at a single event or the aggregate, and get your whole year of impact in one view.

The best part is that all of this impact data is collected automatically, through actions people take at your event. It doesn’t require any surveys or other manual data collection. If you want to capture additional information, we also offer optional surveys you can send as prompts. You can choose to send right after the event concludes, which increases the likelihood that folks will start and finish the survey.

This data isn’t just for funders. It helps build trust in your community. When you track the connections folks make and the things they start, you’re telling them: we value what you do here, not just that you attended. That gives people agency. And when you share honestly with your community, this is where we are, here’s how many people stopped showing up, and what we are trying to improve, you create the shared understanding that deepens connection. When someone shares a Moment saying this is the first time I’ve felt connected in my neighborhood, it opens a door. Someone else reads it and thinks of the neighbor they know is lonely, and invites them.

And yes, it gives you the tools to fundraise. What we’re really doing is handing you the same instruments the big national organizations have. Better ones, because you can show exactly how folks are showing up, connecting, and acting, at a level of detail national organizations can’t reach. If you are a national organization, the same dashboard aggregates the impact of all your chapters, so you can tell a bigger story too.

Haneef has always known the impact is there. Now he can show it. You can too.

Do you work for a foundation or are a grant-giving organization? We’d love to chat with you to continually improve how to best structure the data to support folks who use Plurality. Please book a time with us.

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Photo credit: By Freedom4U - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

Around the same time, another organizer told us the word “volunteers” didn’t fit her people because it implies a directionality of service. Folks that attend her events are all just neighbors and friends showing up for each other, and they have a unique word to describe them: “camerados.” So we made that Volunteer tab customizable too.

These are small changes, but they reflect the company we’re trying to build. We want Plurality to be co-built with the folks who are building communities, and we want to earn their trust. We talked with hundreds of them before we wrote a single line of code, we host Community Hours every day to hear what’s working and what isn’t, and we keep adjusting the platform to fit the work folks are already doing.

During these conversations, most folks tell us that they love the tools we are building but many of them share the same comment: “I just hope we didn’t need another tech platform.” We tell them we wholeheartedly agree.

Adam and I are a strange pair to have started a tech company. We don’t trust tech and deeply dislike what it is doing to the people and communities we love.

In my own neighborhood, I’ve seen how social media affects the kids I mentor. Their whole lives are marked by what happens on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. They are told repeatedly that their “worth” is measured by how they act and look, what they wear, and what they do. They tell me they rarely have meaningful conversations with their closest friends because it’s too hard now.

Most tech companies run on the same model. You and your community are the product. Every second of your attention gets sliced up, measured, and sold. The longer you scroll, the more they earn, so everything is designed to keep you scrolling: your friendships, your outrage, your loneliness. All of it is monetizable.

The part that breaks most people’s trust is that many tech companies know the harm they cause and do little to fix it. A Reuters investigation last November, built on Meta’s own internal documents, found the company projected about $16 billion in a single year, roughly 10% of its revenue, from ads for scams and banned goods. Meta’s response wasn’t to stop but to set a goal of trimming that share to 6% by the end of 2026. Just this month, a BBC investigation found ads on Instagram in India steering people toward child sexual abuse material, and India’s government gave Meta seven days to explain how ads like that got approved at all.

The newer platforms aren’t better. They’re making us lonelier. A 12-month study published in Psychological Science this year followed more than 2,000 adults and found that lonely people turn to AI chatbots for companionship, but it only made the loneliness worse over time. Researchers at Aalto University believe this is caused by the way the chatbots operate: AI “friends” never ask anything of you, which makes real friendships, the messy kind that require effort, patience, and a little bit of discomfort, feel too difficult. The companies building these tools have seen this research. Many of them wrote it.

So we built Plurality to run in the opposite direction.

We don’t want your attention. We want you to spend as little time on our platform as possible. Every tool we build pushes you back into real life, toward the deep sense of belonging that comes from shared moments with new and old friends. We’ve even made the most meaningful tools of Plurality work over text messages. If someone can receive a text, they can fully take part. Nobody has to download anything.

We are also committed to never sell your data to brokers. Our business model is simple enough to fit in a sentence: we take a small commission when your community donates to support your work, and we offer optional add-ons for organizers who want them. We only make money when you grow and your community thrives. There’s no version of our success that requires us to treat you or your community as a product.

We see our role as giving you good tools, getting out of the way, and listening when you tell us the word “volunteers” isn’t the right word.

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