If you’re trying to unite a neighborhood, it’s common that you will be working with two groups that are very different from each other in...

You are strategically placed to love eight other families. Those eight families live in the three houses across the street, the three...

I saw it before I made it up the stoop. There was a gift bag with pretty paper sticking out the top and a decorative tag dangling from...

We live in a little hundred-year-old Tudor house on the north side of Minneapolis. Our second story is a one-bedroom mother-in-law...

Walking has always been a way for folks to get outside, move their bodies, stay healthy, walk their dogs, and take young kids on a...

It’s commonly said that there are things you don’t know, things you know that you don’t know, and things you don’t know that you don’t...

Loving your neighbors requires moving from vague familiarity with the people who live around you to co-investing with them for your...

Just nine days before Christmas in 2006, our family moved to a new neighborhood. Well, actually, we moved to a neighborhood that was new...

I have the kind of friends they make sitcoms about. The kind of friends that make you ugly cry/laugh when you’ve had a bad day. The kind...

All of our community outreach centers around a church, a Vietnamese congregation, that meets in the basement of a large, mostly-white...

Judging people too quickly is a common mistake for many. We’re certainly no different. Here’s an example. When we moved into our...

Most of us have experienced the subtle-but-undeniable good of hanging out in a casual environment with others. Whether at a coffeeshop,...

A few years back, I made a road trip with my father to his hometown of Stafford, Kansas. It’s a tiny, rural town with a declining...

When I was in my early twenties, my husband’s and my friends came up with an idea to begin a series of at-home concerts, of sorts. Not a...

In talking about how to be a hopeful neighbor in these modern days, it can be easy to get bogged down in the greater turmoil of the...