The Neighborhood
Connecticut’s Network for Service
With volunteers and civic leaders, we’re building a statewide peer community that makes impact more sustainable, problems more solvable, and solutions more scalable.
Across Connecticut, volunteers and civic leaders show up consistently for their communities and they achieve extraordinary impact.
Yet, a relatively small core group advance the majority of efforts, and Connecticut’s civic ecosystem suffers from fragmentation—the isolation of active volunteers and civic leaders from each other, and the invisibility of what is working in one community to everyone else.
What would it take to build connective infrastructure that helps volunteers and civic leaders already doing the work do it better, stay in it longer, and inspire others to join them?
We started by listening to active volunteers and civic leaders throughout Connecticut.
Connecticut has 169 towns and cities—each with its own character, institutions, and remarkable people who show up, year after year, to make their community stronger. These volunteers and civic leaders are the connective tissue of civic life: the board members, the coaches, the food pantry directors, the block association chairs, the emergency responders, the municipal staff, the organizers who serve their neighbors, and more.
Despite sharing common motivations and challenges—volunteer recruitment and retention, succession planning, and civic fragmentation—these leaders struggle to connect across towns and cities, and sometimes even within their own community. Connecticut lacks infrastructure to connect and support them.
We learned. And now we’re building. We envision a Connecticut where the state’s most active volunteers and civic leaders are supported by a genuine peer community where geographic distance doesn’t prevent neighborly connection, where good ideas spread organically from one community to another, and where showing up for your community means joining a larger movement. In a neighborhood, people look out for one another, share resources, and celebrate each other’s contributions. That’s the Connecticut we’re building.
We plan to launch the first program this summer. Connect with us to get involved!
