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What If NDG Became a Neighbourhood That Never Let a Good Idea Die?

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  Every day, people throughout NDG notice things. A resident walks past an empty patch of land and thinks: “That could be a beautiful little garden.” A teenager looks at a blank wall and imagines a mural. A parent notices children playing on a street corner and thinks: “Wouldn't a basketball hoop be wonderful here?” A senior wishes there were a bench halfway between home and the grocery store. A merchant wonders whether several businesses could combine deliveries for neighbours who have difficulty getting out. Someone looks at an unused room in an apartment building and imagines a little library. Someone else sees an isolated neighbour and thinks of starting a weekly coffee hour. Most of these ideas disappear. Not because they are bad ideas. Because we have become accustomed to thinking: “Who am I to do anything about it?” I would like to change that. In A NuVo World, good ideas belong to everyone. Imagine if NDG developed a new community habit: Whenever someone s...
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What If NDG Became a Neighbourhood That Made Room for Joy?

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  There are many serious things we want to accomplish in NDG. We want to reduce loneliness. Help people who are struggling. Make food more accessible. Strengthen families. Support seniors. Create opportunities for young people. Build stronger relationships between neighbours. All of these things matter enormously. But while we're busy trying to make life better , I don't want us to forget something equally important: Life is supposed to be enjoyed. What if one of the defining characteristics of A NuVo World in NDG became something wonderfully simple? We create more reasons for people to smile. Not once a year at a major festival. Everywhere. All the time. Imagine walking through NDG on an ordinary Tuesday and discovering a man playing piano outside a café. A few blocks away, three children have covered a sidewalk with colourful chalk drawings. Someone has placed a bubble machine beside a park bench. A retired couple is teaching people how to dance. A restaur...
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What If Every Street in NDG Had a “Someone to Call”?

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  We talk a lot about building community through friendship, kindness and connection. But there is another kind of community that matters enormously: Knowing that when something goes wrong, you are not completely on your own. A senior wakes up after a heavy snowfall and cannot safely clear the front steps. A parent suddenly needs someone to pick up milk because a sick child is sleeping. A neighbour's car won't start. Someone has to go to the hospital and needs their dog walked. A new arrival doesn't understand an important letter they received. A light bulb needs changing at the top of a ladder. A frightened person simply needs somebody nearby for ten minutes. None of these situations necessarily requires an organization. Sometimes they require just one neighbour willing to answer the phone. So here is an idea for the NDG I hope we can build: Someone to Call Imagine if every apartment floor, building or small section of a street had several neighbours who exc...
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What If NDG Became a Neighbourhood Where We Borrowed Before We Bought?

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  Most of us have things sitting in closets, cupboards, basements and garages that we use perhaps once or twice a year. A drill. A ladder. A folding table. A cake pan. A sewing machine. Camping equipment. A pressure washer. Gardening tools. A suitcase. A set of chairs for a family gathering. Meanwhile, somewhere three doors away, somebody may be heading to a store to buy exactly the thing we already have. What if NDG developed a wonderfully simple new habit? Ask a Neighbour First. Before buying something we will rarely use, we ask: “Does anybody nearby have one I could borrow?” It sounds like an idea about saving money. And it certainly could do that. But I think something much more important would happen. We would begin depending upon one another again. There is a peculiar thing about borrowing a ladder from a neighbour. You have to knock on their door. You have to talk. You learn their name. Perhaps you discover they are repairing their kitchen. Perhaps ...
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What If NDG Became a Neighbourhood of Open Doors?

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  There was a time when borrowing a cup of sugar from the person next door wasn't unusual. Children knocked on one another's doors. Neighbours sat on front steps. Someone might call across a balcony. People didn't necessarily become best friends—but they knew who lived around them . Today, we can live ten feet from another human being for years without knowing their name. That seems like such a small thing. I think it is actually an enormous thing. Because when we don't know one another, every challenge becomes somebody else's problem. But once the stranger in Apartment 304 becomes Maria , everything changes. When the elderly gentleman three doors down becomes George , we notice when we haven't seen him for a few days. When the young mother upstairs becomes Fatima , perhaps we offer to carry the stroller. When the teenager downstairs becomes Alex , perhaps we ask how school is going instead of merely passing in the hallway. Names transform strangers into people....
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What If NDG Became a Neighbourhood Where Nobody Ate Alone Unless They Wanted To?

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  Loneliness doesn't always look lonely. Sometimes it looks like an elderly man buying one frozen dinner. Sometimes it is the person in the apartment across the hall whom we have seen hundreds of times but never really met. Sometimes it is a newcomer who left family and friends thousands of kilometres away. Sometimes it is a student eating dinner over a laptop. Sometimes it is a widow setting a table for one after having set it for two for fifty years. And sometimes it is somebody surrounded by people who still feels completely alone. We cannot eliminate loneliness from NDG. But perhaps we can make it much harder for loneliness to remain invisible . I would love to see a simple community habit spread throughout our neighbourhood: The Extra Plate Whenever we're preparing a meal, ordering a pizza, having a barbecue or sitting down for Sunday breakfast, we occasionally ask ourselves: “Is there somebody nearby who might enjoy sharing this with us?” Not somebody we nee...
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What If NDG Became a Neighbourhood That Asked, “What Can You Teach Me?”

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  Every person walking the streets of NDG knows something that somebody else would love to learn. Think about that for a moment. Behind the doors of our apartments and houses are thousands upon thousands of skills, experiences, traditions and talents. Someone knows how to repair a bicycle. Someone can bake magnificent bread. Someone speaks three languages. Someone knows how to grow tomatoes. Someone can teach a child to play guitar. Someone knows how to sew on a button, prepare an incredible curry, use a computer, paint a room, make a household budget, change a tire, take a beautiful photograph or fix a dripping faucet. And our older neighbours possess something particularly precious: decades of accumulated knowledge. Yet much of it remains hidden because we've created a society in which, when we need to learn something, we usually turn to a screen rather than to one another . What if NDG began doing something different? What if we created a culture of neighbours teac...
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