Hey There, Neighbor!
What if community wasn’t something you had to schedule weeks in advance?
We started with a simple desire: a daily life filled with familiar faces. Recognizing people on your street, running into friends at the grocery store, texting someone nearby for a spontaneous walk or coffee.
So much of adult social life can feel like “long-distance friendship”: coordinating calendars, commuting across the city, and turning connection into another task to manage.
Meanwhile, there are incredible people living just around the corner.
“Hey there, neighbor!” is about making local connection part of everyday life again, helping neighbors become familiar faces, and familiar faces become real community.
What to expect:
2:00 - 2:10 Snack + ice breaker activity: Do you love sitting around waiting for events to start? I don’t, so we’ll do a fun interactive activity as people come in!
2:10 - 2:30 Short talk: Roza will share learnings from building “Hey there, neighbor!,” a project pairing neighbors for 10-minute chats, and explore the bigger questions behind it: the state of modern community life, why we’re in a loneliness epidemic, why modern social norms aren’t meeting our needs, and why the future of social life may be hyperlocal.
2:30 - 3:30 Breakout groups: Guided group conversations about neighbors, belonging, and everyday community, from memories of neighborhood life growing up, to what feels missing now, to what we might want to create together.
You’ll leave having met a few nearby people, learned more about the project, and hopefully found one small way to make local connection feel easier.
Sign up to meet your neighbors at heythereneighbor.com/hi - a social infrastructure project aiming to spark hyperlocal connection, by giving neighbors the easiest possible way to meet: a 10-minute chat!