Our Story

The end of 2024 was difficult for a lot of us; the election results paved the way for more of the hardships we'd already seen in the late 2010s. We were facing at least four years of continued division, vitriol, destruction of the values we'd grown up with; even threats to our human rights. The only relief we could feel was through doom-scrolling. The algorithms soothed us by feeding us post after post of news by which we collectively felt outraged. At the same time, scrolling through endless stories about all the things that scared us only made nights longer, and a feeling of hope further away than ever.

In February of 2025, many of us were inspired by an energetic TikTok video made by Colleen Carswell about building a coalition of representatives county by county. The thought that it was as easy as finding other people like you - not online, but in person - and acting in solidarity, with regularity, made it seem more tangible and realistic. Hope was finally something that we could find, and it started within us and our communities. No Small Act was rooted in the idea that, no matter how small your town is or who you voted for, if enough of us wanted change, all we needed to do was one small thing at a time. The more neighbors we knew, the more actions we could do together, the more momentum we could make with these small acts in solidarity.

Through that first year, we learned a lot about organizing. Volunteers worked to keep our feet under us while attempting to maintain an influx of thousands - mostly activists - many of whom had already found other organizations to work with. The overarching concept of connecting like-hearted people from the hyper-local level to the national level emerged as our strength. We saw organizations with thousands of members struggle to mobilize consistently between states and between communities. Meanwhile, we were able to use our structures to connect people in need with the help they were desperate to find. Through these successes and a visionary mission called The Connector Strategy, we chose to reimagine our work into The Neighborhood Collective.

The Neighborhood Collective isn't reinventing the wheel. We are not trying to be an organization of actions - those are plentiful. We hope to build an ecosystem of communication that serves communities on a human level, helping folks who need a hand find those who have one to lend. We help individuals find organizations they can connect with and assist organizations in connecting to coalitions, so their work is amplified.

The Neighborhood Collective is a nation of neighbors. State-level and County-level Teams with Partnerships both nationally and locally, working to build connections so that all of our neighbors thrive in vibrant communities, rooted in strong, resilient civic action.