A diverse group of eight people sits on folding chairs in a room with beige doors and light green walls. They are talking animatedly with one another.
Photograph from the Neighbours Helping Neighbours Pilot Project 2024
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No Help Needed, We’re Canadian!?

Working through common attitudes and resistances towards neighbourly helping.

ByBRN

One of the most important learnings from Building Resilient Neighbourhood’s (BRN’s) Neighbours Helping Neighbours (NHN) pilot was that connecting is an easy first step for residents to make, but engaging in mutual support requires a bigger leap.

An elder Asian man and two elder white women are having an animated conversation. They are indoors sitting on folding chairs.

Done in collaboration with Hey Neighbour Collective and ten delivery partners, the NHN pilot brought residents of multi-unit housing together to learn about and nurture intergenerational neighbourly support. It’s something that’s becoming all the more important with growing economic uncertainties, and in a country where families and friends often live far apart.  Yet for residents, while organizing and participating in social activities in their buildings felt relatively easy, many reported feeling some level of anxiety, hesitation, or resistance about “helping” neighbours.

Many residents said that Canada’s dominant culture of celebrating and normalizing individualism contributed to creating feelings of discomfort around asking for or offering help to others. Some residents reported feeling more comfortable offering help than asking for it, while others felt uncomfortable with both—asking felt like exposing vulnerability and imposing upon another, while offering felt like they were implying the other person was less capable.

Furthermore, the idea of “building mutual support” encompassed a wide range of possible types of ongoing activities—and therefore could seem intimidating to commit to participating in.

A light-skinned feminine person in white pants and a black sweater points to a Powerpoint slide on a screen titled "Expanding Our Support Networks". The person appears to be facilitating a workshop on helping neighbours connect with each other. Two people in the foreground are watching the facilitator.

Fortunately, delivery partners and resident-leaders found ways to shift these attitudes and move neighbour groups more comfortably towards engaging in mutual support activities and projects. Some of the strategies that were most effective included:

  • Allowing time and space for residents to discuss any concerns openly and frankly, without pressure on anyone to make decisions or commitments, while inviting views from people who’ve experienced less individualistic cultures.
  • Fostering the social connections, familiarity, and trust that make it easier to ask and offer help to one another.
  • Collectively establishing reasonable “boundaries” for what is asked for or offered, and for everyone’s privacy and safety to be protected.
  • Considering simple ways to start, such as specific types of helping in discrete, time-limited contexts.  (Emergency preparedness projects were found to be a good starting point.)

Since there’s no doubt that engaging in mutual support is a bigger step for any group of neighbours than simply connecting socially, we also found that a neutral facilitator can help. A facilitator can guide residents through these sometimes sensitive discussions and the complexity of emotions and cultural attitudes around neighbourliness and helping—and assist in bringing the group along at its own pace towards fostering a culture of neighbourly support.

Learn more in the Neighbours Helping Neighbours: Pilot Learning Report 2023-2025.