The second best part of Neighborhood Village Project: texting during zoom calls

In spring 2025, I participated in the third cohort of Neighborhood Village Project (shoutout to Deborah Tien, whose community google doc is where I first heard about NVP!).

The best part of the ten week cohort was definitely the people I met, especially the great folks in my Friday pod. I mean, I got to be in a weekly call with Nate Tubbs— need I say more?

But this post isn’t about the best part of NVP. This post is about the second best part. And the second best part is something brilliant that NVP’s fearless leader Savannah Kruger did in her facilitation of our weekly meeting: she created space for doing. In our weekly zoom meetings, after discussing the week’s topic and checking in about our progress and challenges, Savannah created breakout rooms for continued discussion. However, before we split off into the breakout rooms, she would also say, “if a better use of your time would be to actually do the work, do the work now.” I took advantage of that opportunity and used the time to do something really basic: send text messages to a few of my neighbors and ask them what they thought about a potluck.

Savannah’s facilitation gave us permission to use the meeting time to not just talk about the work of neighboring but to actually do it. Sometimes the challenge comes down to just having time to send a few text messages. So creating that intentional time is especially helpful when folks are busy, and outside of the meeting, neighboring isn’t their top priority. When busy people are taking an hour of their week to focus on neighboring, it can be incredibly impactful to spend some of that time on the small steps of getting to know our neighbors.

I sent the same text to a few of my neighbors whose phone numbers I happened to have (most of whom I’d never had an in-person conversation with). The positive response made me excited to plan a potluck. The potluck didn’t actually happen until the beginning of October— the very last day of 2025 SF Good Neighbor Week— and it was magical. But those seeds were planted in NVP3. Thank you Neighborhood Village Project for encouraging me to text during our meeting.