A simple act to strengthen civic life
What we learned from our neighborhood gathering experiment in Charlottesville – and how you can host a gathering of your own through our new $50 microgrant
BLUF: We’re launching a $50 microgrant for you to gather your neighbors to imagine the possibilities for your shared place (see “What’s Next” section). But first, we share an overview of our approach and learnings from the neighbor gathering microgrant pilot we ran in Charlottesville this past spring.
“What’s one thing that any community could do right now to strengthen local civic life?”
This is the question I kept getting as I was rolling out the Connective Tissue Policy Framework last year. Every time I was asked this, my mind would go to the simple initiatives that excited me most during my research, like Canning, Australia’s microgrants for welcoming newcomers and Boston’s microgrants for neighborhood block parties. And almost every time, I would blurt out something like: “Every community should offer microgrants for neighbors to gather their neighbors — block parties, barbecues, neighborhood olympics, whatever. The important thing is to get neighbors out having fun, interacting with each other, and working together.”
QQ: Have you ever said something so many times that you became convinced of it yourself? Well, that’s what happened to me. And by the start of this year, it got to the point where I thought to myself, “I need to walk the talk and try this out where I live.”
So, on a bit of a whim this past spring, I launched a microgrant-funded neighbor gathering series for Charlottesville area residents. With the support of three volunteers (Margo Miller, Katrina Sommer, and Evan Vahouny), we built the entire initiative from scratch — from promotion materials, to a toolkit for hosts, to the back-end process and systems. And thanks to the support of the UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy (where I’m a fellow), we distributed $100 microgrants to 30 different gathering hosts who brought together 500 neighbors, almost all of whom committed to taking next steps together after the gatherings.
If I was convinced of the potential of microgrants for neighbor gatherings before trying it myself, I’m finding myself convicted (I think that’s more than convinced) after running this pilot. That’s why I’m writing this piece: to synthesize our experience creating the microgrant pilot in Charlottesville with the hope that it will inspire others to start something similar in their communities.
In the sections that follow, I share how the neighbor gathering series worked, what happened and what we learned as a result of the pilot, and what open questions we still have. I conclude by sharing what’s next for us: re-launching a $50 version of the microgrant with the Relational Tech Project to spur neighborhood gatherings nationwide.
Why do this now? Because in an era when it feels like distant, unaccountable forces are exerting control over our day-to-day lives — be they government, corporate, or philanthropic — gathering our neighbors to better our shared places can be a small but revolutionary act to reclaim our agency.
How It Worked
If you take one thing away from this section, it should be this: Giving residents microgrants for neighborhood gatherings is really easy to do. When you design for simplicity, create enough structure to give people direction without restriction, and entrust neighbors to creatively gather their neighbors, good things will happen. No logic model, five-year strategic plan, or rigorous reporting forms required.
In our initial design of the neighbor gatherings microgrant, we asked three main questions. How do we design this to be as simple as possible for us to run and our neighbors to host? How do we anchor the gatherings on imagining what’s possible, rather than fixating on what’s broken? And how do we connect people to their shared place, instead of national politics or abstract ideas? The latter two questions informed the theme for the entire gathering series — “possibilities for our shared place” — which we threaded throughout our promotion and facilitation materials.
Our emphasis on simplicity, meanwhile, guided our whole process for developing the host journey. We designed the application to take no more than 3-5 minutes to fill out. If an applicant met our simple qualification criteria, we would distribute funding within a business day of receiving it. Once approved, we would send hosts a “Neighbor Gatherings Toolkit,” complete with a start-to-finish checklist, facilitation guide, comms materials, and FAQs for hosting. Finally, our reporting form was as straightforward as our application. All we asked for was one picture as proof the gathering happened (no receipts required), the takeaways and commitments that emerged from the gathering, and optional suggestions for improvements.
But where did we actually get the money to do this? Fortunately, I had $3,000 left in my budget for my fellowship with UVA, and thanks to some creativity from colleagues Stefanie Georgakis-Abbott and Nikki Kain, we were able to use those funds for the microgrants. We landed on $100-$120 per microgrant — about $10-$15 per person for an 8-12 person gathering. We hoped this would be significant enough to cover the cost of food or supplies for a gathering, but small enough to allow us to distribute 20-30 microgrants. The one hitch was that, due to restrictions tied to university funding, we needed to give these away as VISA gift cards rather than as cash or checks. (This was neither simple for us to administer nor simple for our hosts to use).
With the theme created, process designed, materials developed, and funding in place, it was time to go live. Our execution was fairly straightforward. I spent 5-10 hours per week on the project from February through April: promoting the microgrant opportunity, reviewing applications, distributing the gift cards and toolkit to approved applicants, and addressing questions as they arose. I also received wonderful volunteer help from Katrina and Margo, who sent the post-gathering reporting form to hosts and followed up until we had a 100 percent completion rate. The only thing we committed to doing that we didn’t do was organize a debrief for our hosts, and that was because I got a concussion the week after the last gatherings happened. So it goes.
What Happened
The success of this gathering series was far from guaranteed. Just before we launched our application in February, a lifelong Charlottesville resident who is very involved in the community said to me: “I’d be surprised if you got more than five people to host.” I was worried he might be right. In the first two weeks, when we were promoting it through my limited referral networks, we received three applications.
But then we started posting on three of the most active community Facebook pages, and things took off. By the time the application window closed a month later, we had received 70 applications from prospective hosts from across the region. Ultimately, we disbursed $3,000 in microgrant funding — 30 microgrants of $100 each — to hosts representing 25 different neighborhoods, towns, and counties in the area. And between March and April, these hosts held 30 gatherings with approximately 500 neighbors joining.
One of the most pleasantly surprising developments from this experiment was the vast range of gatherings people hosted. While about half of our grantees hosted a shared meal, the other half proposed gatherings of their own. We had two people organize block parties. We had multiple people host seed starting events in the spirit of the season. We had a few gatherings for neighborhood parents of preschool and elementary school-aged children. We even had one dude who hosted a beer tasting event for 20+ people; his primary takeaways were simple yet compelling: “1. People like tasting beers; 2. People like sharing food; 3. People like doing both together.”
Our other hosts shared key takeaways that were equally compelling. The phrase “hunger for connection” came up often in post-gathering reflections. Many neighbors, including those who lived next to each other for years, met each other for the first time. Many others expressed a desire to deepen relationships with neighbors they typically just wave to. The shadow of the pandemic loomed large over these gatherings. Time and again, neighbors described both the havoc that COVID-era isolation wreaked on their sense of neighborly connection, and the strong motivation to “rebuild what was lost” during that period of isolation.
Fortunately, our hosts translated this motivation to rebuild into concrete action: Almost all of our neighbors made commitments to take tangible next steps with one another. Most neighbors committed to hosting recurring gatherings in the neighborhood — from potlucks and Shabbat dinners, to annual block parties and seasonal gatherings, to a neighborhood “spirit day.” Many neighbors committed to making tangible improvements to their shared place: building a music stage for a neighborhood market, painting murals on buildings and streets, and petitioning for speed bumps and crosswalks on neighborhood roads. And some neighbors opted to build communications infrastructure and resources, including shared neighborhood list-servs, newsletters, wikis, and photo albums.
This didn’t require hundreds of thousands of dollars, countless staff hours, or expensive administrative systems. All it took was a simple $100 microgrant, a basic toolkit and facilitation guide, and a few reminder emails.
What We Learned
Why did these microgrants for neighbor gatherings seem to “work?” While there were lots of factors at play, we think it came down to three key dynamics: they provided a permission structure for hosts to organize, an accountability structure for hosts to follow through, and a commitment structure for neighbors to take action after the gathering.
What do we mean by permission structure? Essentially, participating in our official-ish neighbor gathering series gave hosts the permission (or opportunity or excuse) to bring their neighbors together. By becoming a part of something bigger than themselves, hosts felt more supported and less vulnerable than purely organizing neighbors on their own. This theme of “permission” came in many forms. Some hosts wanted to overcome the inertia of COVID and bring their neighbors together again for the first time since the pandemic. Others were new to their neighborhoods and were seeking an opportunity to meet their neighbors. Others still were actively looking for excuses to host more often, and this gave them a tangible chance to do so. The small nudge of creating a shared project for hosts to join — along with reducing the friction of cost through the microgrant — helped many tap into the agency they had all along.
The $100 microgrant funding, meanwhile, created a sense of accountability among hosts to follow through. The risk of hosts getting cold feet and backing out is real, especially if hosting neighbors is already pushing your comfort zone. Some people you invite may bail, the work of organizing can feel overwhelming, and you may experience the natural resistance to doing something strange and new. In these moments of doubt, some hosts will want to call things off. But receiving $100 establishes a feeling of obligation; essentially, “I received the money, I can’t back out now.” And this obligation pushes us to follow through with the difficult, uncomfortable, even scary act of gathering our neighbors for the first time.
But what happens after hosts bring neighbors together is as important as the gathering itself. That’s why we built a modest commitment structure into the gathering series design: to encourage neighbors to commit to next steps for bettering their shared place. Our facilitation guide prompted hosts to close the gathering with a collective commitment, while our reporting form asked hosts to share these “concrete next steps, actions, or commitments.” This gentle expectation helped shift the orientation among hosts — from the gatherings being purely about bringing their neighbors together, to also being about cultivating longer-term membership in the neighborhood. And this commitment structure proved effective — almost all of the neighbors identified tangible follow-ups — making these gatherings the start of something, rather than just a series of one-off events.
What We’re Asking
Yes, many facets of our Charlottesville pilot seemed to “work” — especially for an initial experiment — but we were also left with several open questions.
Some of these questions were about demographics. For instance, about 80 percent of our hosts were women. And while we didn’t collect any information on class or educational attainment, we suspect that most of our hosts had college degrees. Should we expect that women and those with college degrees will just be more likely to raise their hands to organize these types of gatherings? Or, are there changes to language, promotion, and recruitment that can help us achieve more gender and socioeconomic representation among hosts? Our hunch is the latter.
Other questions were about support structures. What’s enough — in terms of orientations, checklists, facilitation guides, and the like — to help first-time hosts feel supported but not overwhelmed with resources? How can you build these resources to be taken, translated, and adapted to local contexts? And what role, if any, should peer support among hosts play in these neighbor gathering microgrants?
Finally, we have lingering questions about funding. Should the microgrants be a flat amount, or should they vary based on the type of gathering and the level of need of the host? If one goal is to facilitate as many of these gatherings as possible, what’s the least amount of money you could give per microgrant that still enables these gatherings to happen? And what could the long-term funding source be for these microgrants in local communities — government, philanthropy, member dues, or something else?
If we were a nonprofit trying to “develop a program” for us to “manage” or “own,” perhaps we’d be shyer about admitting we have so many open questions. But we’re not. We ran an experiment, and open questions like these are an invitation toward future collective action, experimentation, learning, and diffusion.
What’s Next
What could this collective experimentation look like? We currently have two distinct questions related to what’s next. The first is systemic: How can this microgrant model be translated into local communities? The second is practical: What’s next for our little neighbor gathering microgrant pilot?
I can say unequivocally that every place should create a microgrant fund to encourage neighbors to gather with neighbors. They may very well be the least expensive, least time-intensive way to cultivate neighborhood connection and membership. Plus, they have the added benefit of showing residents that they are trusted, essentially saying: “You know how to best bring your neighbors together, so do your thing!”
But where exactly could such a neighbor gathering fund sustainably “live?” Perhaps within local government, as Boston has done within its Office of Civic Organizing to offer microgrants for neighborhood block parties and “Spooky Streets.” Perhaps it could live within a local, civically oriented nonprofit — like CivicLex’s new Neighborhood Connections program or Warm Cookies’ Civic House Parties. Perhaps it could live within a civic media organization, as Jennifer Brandel spelled out in her recent Medium piece. Or, perhaps most appropriately, it could live within a local community foundation, which almost definitionally should be focused on cultivating the civic ecology of its particular place. Each community will have to figure out the actual “how” of translation and adaptation, but if a goof like me could make it work in a few months with $3,000, I believe you can too.
What’s next for us? For a while now, we’ve been interested in how a digital newsletter like ours can facilitate local, in-person civic activations. We have a national reach to almost 10,000 subscribers and followers, and many are committed to experimenting with new approaches, practices, and ways of being to help realize our generational project of civic renewal. We’ve already seen you test out our ideas in your local contexts (e.g., activities fairs, welcome kits, homecomings); why not more intentionally fund and support this experimentation? We have no good reason not to.
That’s why, today, we’re re-launching our neighbor gathering microgrants through the Connective Tissue newsletter. We’re funding the initiative with $2,500 from our recent membership launch,* and we’re offering $50 microgrants for neighbors to gather with neighbors to “imagine possibilities for your shared place.” You can host whatever type of gathering you want — a shared meal, a block party, an autumn-themed event, whatever — it just needs to fall between October 2nd and November 9th and connect to our thematic anchors of “possibilities” and “shared place.” If you receive the microgrant (or choose to participate without the microgrant), you will get access to several organizing supports, including our orientation, checklist, facilitation guide, and FAQs.
We’re so excited to team up with the Relational Tech Project on this next iteration of the microgrant. Josh, Deborah, and Sadev incubated this project at a retreat that we hosted in May, and their vision for relational technology — “tools crafted by, with, and for neighbors” that are “made to help us care for and trust each other” — is deeply aligned with the ethos of this neighbor gatherings series and our newsletter. They’ve already helped us translate our Google Doc toolkit from the Charlottesville pilot into a new interactive tool (withneighbors.org), and our long-term hope is that this site can be freely “remixed” and adapted to support local neighborhood microgrant programs.
If you’re interested in becoming a part of this shared experiment and hosting a gathering with your neighbors, apply here by Wednesday, September 24th. The application is simple — just share who you are, where you live, your best guess for your gathering date, and your proposed vision for it. Once the application window closes, we’ll create a pool of “qualified” proposals, run a random selection process, and send $50 to selected hosts by Friday, September 26th. From there, you’ll be able to draw on our support resources, host your gathering between October 2nd and November 9th, and commit to some next step with your neighbors.
The writer Douglas Rushkoff says “borrowing a drill” and “gathering with your neighbors” could “save the world.” We won’t go that far. But creating new possibilities for your particular place starts with knowing your particular place, and knowing your particular place starts with knowing your particular neighbors. So join us, gather your neighbors, have some fun, and commit to a next step together. You may not save the world, but you may very well make your neighborhood a better place to live.
*Note: We’ll likely receive way more demand for these gatherings than we’ll be able to fund. If you want to donate to this experiment, please send us a note (theconnectivetissue@gmail.com). Every $50 contributed is another gathering that we can support.
Acknowledgements: I owe a special thanks to Katrina Sommer, Margo Miller, and Evan Vahouny who supported the development and rollout of the pilot; to Erica Dorn, Elise Granata, Maya Pace, Nathalia Benitez-Perez, Maryam Banikarim, Sally Hudson, and Tim Jones who offered guidance on the initial design; and to Nikki Kain and Stefanie Georgakis-Abbott, at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy who helped make it happen.
Sam — thank you for the thoughtful work you’re doing to spark connection through microgrants. The Charlottesville pilot you describe is inspiring, and I deeply appreciate the spirit behind it: making it simple, local, and neighbor-led. These kinds of experiments are urgently needed if we want to rebuild civic trust.
I’d like to share a complementary perspective from my own experience. In my book, I describe how we built a network of more than 65 neighborhood groups in Northern Nevada, engaging thousands of people across our region. What may surprise some is that we did it without any money incentives at all. No stipends, no grant programs — just neighbors who desired to live in a different kind of community.
What we found is that the deepest capacity doesn’t come from injecting money, but from awakening desire and reciprocity. Once people tasted what it meant to belong — to share meals, help each other, and dream together — they didn’t need outside funding to keep going. In fact, when caring committees formed, neighbors began pitching in their own resources, rotating responsibility for food, hosting, and projects. What emerged was not dependency but agency: neighborhoods realizing “we already have what we need among us.”
Just as importantly, these neighborhood efforts were not isolated. They were tied into larger community development initiatives — local living economy networks, food system collaborations, arts and culture partnerships, and trans-religious coalitions. In this way, the small seeds planted on individual streets became part of broader ecosystem-building across the region, weaving neighborhood vitality into movements for cultural, economic, and spiritual renewal.
From that lens, I can see why some might view microgrants as a helpful spark. But in my experience, even that spark is not required. What truly awakens people is not money, but the desire to live differently together. If we confuse cash with capacity, we risk professionalizing what should remain a culture of gift and reciprocity. Civic life withers when it’s outsourced; it thrives when it is lived.
That’s why I believe the long-term power lies not in funding models, but in cultivating a cultural operating system rooted in trust, shared responsibility, and the joy of neighborliness. Money can sometimes remove small barriers, but it is the hunger for connection — and the discovery of our shared abundance — that keeps people walking through it together.
Really love the micro-granting and glad to discover the re-mixing of relational tech. Great stuff!