Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Transformed My Neighborhood
Importance: 6 | # | community, society, psychology
18 months ago, I wasn’t planning on spending more time hanging out with my neighbors than with friends I’d known for decades. It started with a simple goal: my husband Tyler and I wanted that sense of community that feels like it’s only possible in the suburbs, but we believed we could achieve this while living in San Francisco. We brainstormed: should we make cookies and knock on doors? Should we invite neighbors over for dinner? Ultimately, we landed on sipping coffee on our “stoop”.
We met Luke a month or two after we’d been “stooping” on a regular basis. He came by to introduce himself and asked to exchange numbers so we could let him know if we’d be out there in the future, he’d love to join. At the time we didn’t realize how important this moment was for us. We’d been meeting many neighbors in passing but Luke was the first person to offer to sit with us and he wanted to know how to coordinate. In retrospect we should have been trying to get peoples’ numbers all along but hey, we were new to this!
As soon as Luke started coming to stoop we actually started to resemble a group. It was validating to see a few neighbors getting together and this quickly attracted more!
As I write this post, I realize that the “we” from earlier in the post has grown from just Tyler and me to a “we” that represents many more people who are invested in our community. It feels like our neighborhood is thriving. The in-person gatherings continue even without much intervention from the original few who got the ball rolling. The daily chatter on our WhatsApp is so gosh darn wholesome. Someone even sold a car in our ‘classifieds’ chat! Tyler and I have made many new friends in the neighborhood, and our neighbors who never knew each other before are becoming friends with each other.
It's interesting that they spent a month or two (4-8 weekends) just by themselves, waving and stuff. I understand that they did not have concrete plans of how things will progress into the future. But I imagine there must've been many reasons to stop trying after a while before it took off. Persevearance matters. There's thin line between moving on and giving up.