About a year ago, I participated in Cabin's neighborhood accelerator program with the goal of jumpstarting a block association where I live on the Upper West Side. Since then, I have slowly but surely continued to build up community, bit by bit, in fits and starts, over many months.

Community-building work is slow, behind-the-scenes, and often invisible. The hardest part isn't getting started; it's sustaining momentum. As a person with a lot of ideas, this is often the part of the work that's particularly hard for me. (In volunteer work like block-building, this is even tougher, but not impossible.)

I've realized my timeline for the creation process is dependent on my ability to get other people excited enough to keep building with me. In other words: If I can't get other people excited to participate in the vision by the point where I start running out of steam to keep pushing the 0-to-1 phase on my own, I tend to tap out.

Luckily, after about six months of dedicated effort on block-building work, things started to turn around for me. I reconnected with the block president and block organizing committee from a decade prior. They happily invited me to share in the load of community management. I received access to an outdated email list of 150-some names (many now defunct, but enough still live to matter). We added this to the 100 names that I'd generated on my own (through things like lemonade stands, picnics in the park, and literal just canvassing on the street).

Then old documentation started to turn up. A bank account with some small remaining funds from a prior error of block-building. A brochure that promoted our old activities and membership dues process. There was talk of a website and facebook group, which I tracked down through the internet archives.

I spent a night with AI extracting all of the great details from the old documentation, layering in some of the new photos, work, and rebranded logo concept that some neighbors and I came up with last year.

Today we have a mailing list of 250 people and a small but dedicated group of volunteers who meets monthly with me to kick around ideas and give our block as boost. We've hosted rat walks and AI training sessions, we've talked about newsletters and block parties and workshops and installations, but we also realized we need to be realistic given time and budget constraints.

One of the things that's been particularly successful for our block association are simple corner activations: Coffee at the Curb. We set up a table, sent an invite, hang a few fliers and invite neighbors to meet us up for coffee and get involved.

Yesterday was our first activation in the spring, and we had between 40-50 people drop by, included several elected officials and new families who we'd never met before.

At the event, we asked people to share their hopes and dreams for the block, which curated a list of ideas ranging from rat mitigation to block beautification.

Of course, the best ideas always tend to cone from the most surprising places. My favorite was Kids' CitiBikes, an idea that a local fourth-grader came up with on the spot.

I thought it was a brilliant addition to the board. (Why don't we have CitiBikes for kids??) Even though it's likely a little out of scope for what our tiny block association has the power to change...

We ended up generating an additional 30 names to our mailing list, several interested volunteers to pitch in their time, and most important, a renewed sense of energy and purpose to do the thing that's often the hardest of all: Keep going.

PSA: If you're building a local block association or neighborhood, I highly recommend getting connected with the Neighborhood Accelerator Program as a way to get started. Building community is hard enough; you shouldn't have to carry all of the emotional load on your own, and the NAP program might be just what you need to motivate yourself to get the important v0 off the ground.