Welcome Week Build-A-Thon: Make What Your Neighborhood Needs, Together
Welcome Week is about invitation: opening the door to a new friend, a new neighbor, a new sense of belonging where we live. This build-a-thon is about what comes next in your neighborhood.
In this virtual build-a-thon, we'll give ourselves permission to build. Not apps meant to scale everywhere, but relational tech: small, local, open tools made for our own places, with the people around us. A supplies library for the block. A welcome guide for newcomers. A ride board for elders. Working tools you'll be excited to send to your neighbors, made through a process that creates and deepens relationships along the way.
We'll build on Relational Builder, a free and open-source platform from the Relational Tech Project (RTP). If you can describe what your neighborhood needs, you can build it. No coding experience required, and everything you make is yours to keep, share, and evolve after the event.
What to expect:
A short welcome and a few real examples of what neighbors have built across the country
Focused build time, solo or in small groups, with live support from the RTP team
Recommended connections along the way: when someone at the build-a-thon is making something adjacent to yours, we'll point you at each other
A closing demo round, where the whole room gets to try what you made and we encourage one another to invite our neighbors
Your build in the Welcome Week Build-a-thon gallery, so what you make can travel to the next neighborhood
Come with a dream you've been holding, or just come curious! You'll leave with a working tool to bring home, and maybe a few new collaborators.
About the hosts
Sarah Agopian-Khalifé is the Director of the Welcome Committee at the US Chamber of Connection, the nation's civic institution dedicated to building and sustaining the core infrastructure needed to address the greatest issue facing society today — our lack of connection.
Josh Nesbit is co-director of the Relational Tech Project, a nonprofit that creates free, open-source software for relational tech and supports the people building what their neighborhoods need. He serves as a local relational technologist in San Francisco's Outer Sunset, where his neighborhood work started with coffee and donuts on his own block. He previously co-founded Medic, which builds the Community Health Toolkit used by community health workers around the world, and served as CTO at GirlTrek and Technologist in Residence at Emerson Collective. He's an Ashoka Fellow.
Learn more: relationaltechproject.org · Try the builder at relationalbuilder.org · Read the Substack
About Welcome Week
This event is part of the US Chamber of Connection's Welcome Week.
One week. Every city. Millions of doors opening across America.
Because the most powerful force for human connection isn't an app, an algorithm, or a government program. It's an invitation.
Built on the tradition of Blue Star Families' Welcome Week, the US Chamber of Connection is mobilizing communities, neighborhoods, and organizations nationwide to do one simple thing this September — open the door to a new friend.