You don’t have to be friends with your neighbors…

Savannah Kruger, the head of Neighborhood Village Project, attended SF Good Neighbor Week!

💡 My biggest "a-ha" moment about neighboring happened in a zoom breakout room last year. Yep, where the magic happens.

During a Neighborhood Village Project meeting (shoutout to NVP cohort 3!), I was chatting in a breakout room with my awesome cohort-mates Justin Munroe and Kseniya Tuchinskaya. Together we were trying to articulate something that the three of us shared, that felt underrepresented in the broader group's discussions. Many of our peers were focused on turning neighbors into friends, or friends into neighbors, and in our little breakout room, Justin, Kseniya, and I felt something different.

I remember feeling a little self conscious when I said "you know, I'm not looking for more friends. I barely have time to see the friends I have." (Like during the loneliness epidemic, it's embarrassing to say I have a lot of friends and an active social life...)

The reason I'm drawn to neighboring is not about friendship. And I was so relieved when Justin and Kseniya agreed with me. It felt like opening the floodgates in our little breakout room.

I believe that knowing your neighbors feeds a part of your soul that lives as its own category. Your relationship with people in your building or on your block is different from your relationship with family, friends, or coworkers. It's a sacred relationship that stands on its own and deserves its own category. It's about place, it's about safety, it's about mutual aid, and it's about the day-to-day. It can be about making friends but it doesn't have to be. It deserves its own petal on the flower.

I often meet people in San Francisco who support SF Good Neighbor Week because they want to turn neighbors into friends or friends into neighbors. I welcome that perspective, but I keep the focus of the holiday not on friendship but on neighborliness.

Does that make sense?