Help me raise $5,000 on my way to $ 1 Million?
👋 Hello! This is Julia Gitis, the founder of your neighborhood nonprofit, Good Neighbor Lab.
I am lucky to have the Greater Sum Foundation helping me with a $5,000 holiday match. I have until Dec 31 to raise $5,000 from my community. Please help me out by donating an amount that is personally meaningful to you!
I recently turned 40, threw a pretty epic birthday party (IYKYK), and asked my friends and family to donate to Good Neighbor Lab as my birthday present. So for this 2025 holiday fundraiser, I’m branching out a bit farther into my community, asking folks who’ve cheered me on over the years, as well as new friends I’ve met this year, to donate to my holiday fundraiser and help me figure out how to get larger scale funding. Whether it’s been a while or we just met this year— I met so many great folks working on strengthening neighborhoods across the country and helping me launch San Francisco’s very first SF Good Neighbor Week— I hope to reconnect and I hope you can participate.
The truth is that while I’m excited to raise $5,000 this month, I need a million dollars in order for Good Neighbor Lab to achieve the ambitious goals I’ve set, goals that will meaningfully impact San Francisco and those watching us.
If you know me personally, you know that a lot of our success this year— including masterfully bringing a national holiday to San Francisco for the first time— came at the expense of me not sleeping. That’s not your problem, it’s my problem, but if I can hire people to help me out, that would be amazing. I have wonderful volunteers helping me on many of our projects, and it’s also time to hire paid staff.
In addition to paid staff, one of our most popular projects is designing neighborhood bulletin boards for public sidewalks in San Francisco. While I see a clear path to financial sustainability there, that project has significant upfront costs in paying local artists, working on design and fabrication, meeting engineering requirements, and, the most fun part, community engagement. I’ve been scraping by and hacking things together— and the 2025 Next Challenge Grand Prize helped me pay for the current prototype— but designing custom bulletin boards for every neighborhood in San Francisco that wants one (I’ve got quite a waiting list) takes more money than I have in the bank.
In addition to our core programming, we added a new guiding principle to our work in 2026: Reaching San Francisco neighbors who experience the most social isolation. We’ve had success in our work across SF neighborhoods, and from the start we’ve prioritized low-income neighborhoods with non-English language communities. We are now deepening our community engagement with residents and neighborhoods experiencing more social isolation. A specific focus in 2026 is supporting San Francisco residents who are experiencing domestic violence. I am passionate about serving this hard to reach population, and I am excited about the partnerships we have brewing to help us engage with a broader array of our neighbors.
With $1M, I’d be able to:
Hire paid staff to help with program implementation
Hire paid staff to help with community outreach, prioritizing residents increasing the most social isolation
Pay local artists to fabricate custom neighborhood bulletin boards for neighborhoods across the city
Partner with innovative and compassionate community builders across San Francisco and beyond
The last year has been full of learning and I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned in 2026. Our 2026 priorities are:
Strengthen neighbor-to-neighbor relationships in San Francisco, continuing to run the city-wide celebration SF Good Neighbor Week, including the city-wide SF Good Neighbor Awards
Strengthen resident-to-institution connections, continuing to create neighborhood partnerships with local schools, libraries, and newsrooms
Encourage hyperlocal innovation: run the Good Neighbor Hackathon, the country’s only neighborhood tech hackathon
Specific program goals include:
Neighborhood bulletin boards: deepen and expand our neighborhood partnerships and city-wide pilot proposal
Support local schools: Update school profile pages for every TK-12 school in the district and increase school-neighborhood partnerships
Support local news: Highlight local newsrooms, high school and college journalism programs at risk of shutting down
SF Good Neighbor Week: Run San Francisco’s second celebration of National Good Neighbor Day across our wonderful neighborhoods
SF Good Neighbor Awards: Run the city’s annual SF Good Neighbor Awards
SF Good Neighbor Hackathon: Run the country’s only neighborhood tech hackathon and community night
Partnerships and community engagement: Continue to collaborate and partner with community organizations across San Francisco
All this to say, please do donate to my holiday fundraiser so I can reach my $5,000 match, and if you have ideas for how I can get $1,000,000, please contact me. I am grateful for your support!
