Blueprints
Library of Blueprints
Tried-and-true ideas from community builders from across the country. Read their story, get inspired, and bring it to your community.
Art Barter Mart
Modern Art
A cabinet of drawers on the sidewalk. Leave art in a drawer and flip the tab to say TAKE ART. Somebody else takes it home. There are no other rules.
Art Bike
Modern Art
Old bicycles are rescued, made roadworthy, and decorated until each one has a personality and a name. Then the community owns them.
Truth or Drawer
Modern Art
A community game of honesty and audacity. Pick Truth and a gorilla brings you one on a silver tray. Pick Drawer and you have to go do something.
Dinner with Seven Strangers
Community Inspired
A free dinner at someone's home. Seven seats and nobody knows each other.
Amazing Faiths Dinner
Community Inspired
Strangers of different faiths come together to a host's dinner table. A moderator deals question cards, everyone answers from their own life, and nobody is allowed to debate.
Blind Book Club
Community Inspired
Strangers each take home a book wrapped in brown paper, chosen by a few cryptic words. A month later they gather to reveal what they read.
Crochet & Cake
Community Inspired
Bring a cake that represents you and get crochet lessons in return.
Disco Soup
Community Inspired
A neighborhood party around rescued vegetables, where strangers chop and cook to dance music. Then everyone eats free soup.
Drop-In Choir
Community Inspired
A room full of strangers learns one pop song in three-part harmony in a single evening, sings it once for the camera, and goes home.
Hot Ones Night
Community Inspired
One neighbor in the hot seat, ten wings that get progressively brutal, and ten questions that get progressively real. The host eats every wing too.
Neighborhood Bird Walk
Community Inspired
An hour-long slow walk counting the birds you see. The walk is an excuse to notice nature's beauty with new friends.
Neighbors' Day
Community Inspired
One evening a year, a party is held in your street or building. You bring a dish and you meet the people behind the doors you pass daily.
Oh Sew Easy
Community Inspired
Sewing from the absolute beginning: how to thread the machine, how to change the stitch, taught by neighbors.
The Great Listen
Community Inspired
One weekend, young people in the neighborhood sit down with elders, press the record button on a phone, and ask them about their life.
The Great Neighborhood Bake Off
Community Inspired
A tent, some bunting, and everyone on the block baking the same thing on the same afternoon. Judged kindly and enjoyed by neighbors.
The Lunch Club
Community Inspired
Once a month, folks who work alone or are stay-at-home parents get lunch together at a local restaurant and build meaningful friendships.
Wild Card Night
Community Inspired
A deck of questions about life that neighbors draw at random and answer out loud. Nobody, including the host, knows where the evening is going.
Yarn Bombing
Community Inspired
A knitting circle with a mischievous public mission: wrap the neighborhood's cold, ignored metal in color.
36 Questions Night
Community Inspired
Pairs sit face to face and work through 36 questions that get more personal as they go. A psychologist wrote them to make two strangers close. They work on everyone.
Community Garden
Community Inspired
A patch where neighbors grow food and connection side by side. The vegetables are the excuse.
Flamingo Fridays
Community Inspired
A weekly gathering on someone's front lawn. The signal? A plastic pink flamingo in the yard. Whoever takes the bird home hosts next week.
Happy to Chat Bench
Community Inspired
A park bench with a sign: “Sit here if you don't mind someone stopping to say hello.” The sign gives two strangers permission neither could give themselves.
How We Met Night
Community Inspired
An evening where the neighborhood's longtime pairs, couples, best friends, business partners, tell the story of the day they met. Everyone else gets to listen.
Porchfest
Community Inspired
One afternoon a year, the whole neighborhood turns into a music festival. The stages are front porches, and the musicians already live there.
Repair Café
Community Inspired
Neighbors bring their broken toasters, lamps, and torn coats. Volunteers who know how to fix things sit down with them and fix them together, free, with coffee.
Sidewalk Astronomy
Community Inspired
Haul a telescope to a neighborhood spot on a clear night and point it at the moon. Then see how curiosity turns into community.
Soup Pitch Dinner
Community Inspired
Five dollars buys you soup, salad, bread, and a vote. Neighbors pitch ideas for the neighborhood, everyone eats and votes, and the winner walks out with the whole pot.
Stoop Coffee
Community Inspired
Two folding chairs and a weekend morning in front of the house. You don't need a stoop. You need to be visible, and to keep showing up.
The Neighbor's Table
Community Inspired
A table big enough for 20 in the backyard, and a goal audacious enough to fill it: feed 500 neighbors.