Bootstrapping a Block Association

For the past 10 weeks, I’ve been participating in a “Neighborhood Accelerator” with Cabin. If you’ve been following along this blog (or my Instagram) all summer, you’ve likely seen a few glimpses about what this work has looked like for me. 

From cats jumping off roofs to lemonade stands visited by FDNY and mixed success with on-the-street neighbor acquisition tactics, the ups and downs of bootstrapping a block community are not glamorous. And certainly not linear.

But I’m ending this summer in a much better place than where I began. We now have a name, The Manhattan 75, a logo, a contact list of 50 neighbors, and several higher leverage volunteers who want to contribute their time on block and neighborhood efforts. You can see a little more about our goals for this hyper-local neighborhood on our Cabin city page here.

While a lot of this work has quite literally been “pounding the pavement” to move things forward, I owe a lot of this success to the meta community of fellow neighborhood stewards, curated by the Cabin team. Starting a community is a lot like starting a business; even if you know the work that theoretically needs to get done, sometimes you just need a regular dose of peer connectivity, accountability, cheerleading, and ideation partners to get things across the finish line. I’m very grateful to our entire peer cohort in this collective experience, as well as Savannah Kruger for bringing together global community-builders and skillfully facilitating our discussions all summer. 

To celebrate the success of this first cohort, rather than host a “Demo Day,” we invite you to join us for a virtual “Story Slam” on Thursday, September 5 at 10 a.m. ET. In this one-hour event inspired by The Moth, you’ll hear a selection of stories that embody the ethos of each community in this program. 

Now…onto the next!

Apply for the Fall Neighborhood Accelerator Cohort

Cabin is now recruiting their fall cohort of Neighborhood Stewards. No matter where you live around the world, if you’d like to spend a little time and energy investing in your own local block, community, or neighborhood this fall, I encourage you to apply. You can learn more about the initiative and submit an application here: https://cabin.city/accelerator.

Cohort 2 runs from September 23 - December 1, 2024. You can expect weekly calls, a little bit of gentle guidance toward achieving your own neighborhood goals, and access to mentors who are at much later stages of community-building, as well as recent graduates to share back lessons learned.

As I exit my own learning journey from this 0 to 1 phase of neighborhood growth, I’m eager to shift into mentor mode for the next class.

That’s why I’ll be hanging around throughout cohort two and hope to get paired up as a mentor for another New Yorker who’s brave enough to tackle a block build of their own. If this sounds like you, please apply (and feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to talk directly about what this might look like).