We’re thrilled to welcome the newest cohort of partners delivering Connect & Prepare!

Connect & Prepare is an innovative program that helps grow social connections between neighbours and support shared emergency preparedness and resilience in their communities.

Staff from a dozen different organizations are being trained as facilitators of our neighbour-to-neighbour resilience programming, expanding Connect & Prepare’s reach and impact to more places across British Columbia. Through our train-the-trainer model, they’re learning how to deliver and adapt Connect & Prepare in their communities.

On February 24th, we kicked off the second part of this latest round of facilitator training with an in-person gathering of representatives from housing operators, local governments, health authorities, and place-based organizations.

Our new partners in this cohort include:

• Richmond Family Place
• Victoria Downtown Residents Association
• Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House
• Fraser Health
• Vancouver Coast Health
• City of Richmond (Emergency Management)
• Sunshine Coast Regional District
• Metro Vancouver Housing
• BC Housing
• Brightside Community Homes Foundation
• Concert Properties
• Resilient Coast / OneEarth Solutions

Over the coming months, we’ll be supporting these partners as they deliver programming to help neighbours get to know each other, learn about both large-scale emergencies and chronic, everyday stressors, identify assets and priorities, and implement shared preparedness projects.

To learn more about Connect & Prepare, read our story about how residents in four BC Housing buildings strengthened connections with their neighbours and became more confident about preparing for challenges in the future. 

Interested in bringing Connect & Prepare to your community?

We regularly offer training to organizations looking to learn the Connect & Prepare approach. Read about the program and its impacts and reach out to us at info@resilientneighbourhoods.ca.

Capital Region Connection in Action is a region-wide initiative focused on strengthening neighbourly connections, personal belonging, and community resilience in neighbourhoods across the CRD. Through an interactive workshop on May 14^th and an activation campaign during Loneliness Awareness Week (June 15-21, 2026), the project inspires, equips, and supports participants to take action to create and strengthen their own intergenerational communities of support.

Connection in Action will inspire you to join with others to help reduce social isolation and create stronger, more caring, intergenerational communities!

Creating a Village: The Power of Community Connections in Turbulent Times

Thursday, May 14^th, 2026 | 6:00 – 9:00 PM

Free dinner provided | Free to attend

This workshop will cover:

• An introduction to the power of skills-building for grassroots neighbour-to-neighbour connection
• Calls to action to strengthen belonging and connection in our neighbourhoods
• Early planning for activities during Loneliness Awareness Week in June
• Time to connect with other community builders
• Free dinner, so we can relax, socialize, and connect around the table
• Practical next steps and ways to stay engaged with a growing network of “connectors” across the region.

Location:
Victoria Scottish Community Centre
1803 Admirals Rd, Victoria, BC

Loneliness Awareness Week

June 15–21, 2026

Connection in Action will continue with a region-wide activation campaign during Loneliness Awareness Week. Together with community partners across Greater Victoria, we’ll be highlighting and celebrating simple, meaningful ways that people are strengthening neighbourly connections and reducing isolation.

Want to be the first to hear about events and ways to get involved?
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Building Resilient Neighbourhood’s (BRN’s) Neighbours Helping Neighbours (NHN) pilot—done in collaboration with  Hey Neighbour Collective and ten delivery partners—brought residents of multi-unit housing together to learn about and nurture intergenerational neighbourly support. A key learning question was: Can a culture of mutual support be established among neighbours that will help people, especially older adults, age in their own homes or “in the right place”?

The answer from the pilot: A resounding “yes”!

NHN activities ranged from lobby intercepts, surveys, and workshops where residents discussed how to help each other, to resident-led projects setting up systems to help each other on a day-to-day basis or during times of illness or emergencies.

Across all of the activities, it became clear that strengthened social connections—especially alongside growing familiarity and trust—helped create the foundations for residents to ask for, give, and receive help.

In addition, as residents became more connected with each other and with delivery partner organizations, these residents also became more connected to other community services, supports, and resources that could help them age in place.

And while some residents initially had reservations and concerns about asking for or offering help, these resistances were lowered as they openly discussed and became more comfortable with each others’ needs, and established a shared sense of appropriate boundaries.

Finally, when neighbours collaborated to set up any kind of simple system or structure to facilitate mutual assistance—such as an emergency preparedness plan or an ask/offer bulletin board—this helped establish and normalize a culture of helping among one another and across their entire building.

So, although the NHN pilot was short-term, some of the most important elements that help activate neighbourly helping and support aging in place quickly emerged!

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

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.

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.

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.

It can be a big step for a group of neighbours to move together from simply connecting socially to engaging in mutual support — creating a culture of neighbourly helping requires familiarity, trust, and commitment for which some residents may not feel ready. But an equally big learning from Building Resilient Neighbourhoods’ (BRN’s) recent Neighbours Helping Neighbours (NHN) pilot is that emergency preparedness is a popular and effective “gateway” to fostering these kinds of helping among neighbours.

The NHN pilot involved a collaboration with Hey Neighbour Collective and ten delivery partners working in diverse circumstances (see the full report here)— yet it was frequently found that, when presented with a wide range of possible projects to cultivate neighbourly support, resident groups often chose to work on shared emergency preparedness as a first step. Through feedback, focus groups, and interviews with delivery partners and residents, we came to understand the main reasons why emergency preparedness is so popular.

Urgent

Few people feel fully or adequately prepared for a range of possible emergencies, so the topic readily brings up a sense of urgency and importance.

Relatable

Even for residents who may not feel especially interested in building social connectedness more generally, becoming better prepared collectively for emergencies is an easy-to-understand reason for neighbours to connect and help each other.

Adaptable

There’s immense flexibility for neighbour-groups to adapt projects to their circumstances, capacities, and specific concerns and goals. For example, neighbours can engage around preparedness for earthquakes, fires, food security, medical emergencies, helping with home tasks, or supporting each other during periods of chronic illness etc.

Manageable

There are many shared preparedness actions that are lighter-touch, low-cost or free, and can be managed by just a small number of people — such as putting a safety storage bin in a building common area or launching a buddy check-in system between neighbours.

All of these factors make emergency preparedness a natural starting point for resident groups. Along the way, neighbours get to know each other more, and become accustomed to collaborating — neighbours helping neighbours gets “normalized.” 

As one Victoria resident explained, participating in BRN’s Connect & Prepare program and launching an emergency preparedness committee in their multi-unit building brought together many neighbours who’d never met — and fostered greater mutual understanding that laid seeds for other types of helping. “It gets you to meet people and connect, and realize we have much more in common than we don’t,” he said. 

Learn more.

What if our neighbours became sources of everyday support that could allow all of us to grow our social connectedness and resilience, while also staying in our homes longer as we “age in the right place”? This was the driving question behind Building Resilient Neighbourhoods’ (BRN’s) “Neighbours Helping Neighbours” (NHN) pilot. Starting in 2023, BRN and Hey Neighbour Collective worked with ten partners – community-based organizations, housing operators, resident associations, and resident-led groups – who shared this same question and were eager to develop and test different approaches.

The NHN pilot aimed to bring residents of multi-unit buildings together to learn about the value of neighbourly support and to collaborate on taking action together to strengthen mutual assistance. The Neighbours Helping Neighbours: Pilot Learning Report (2023-2025) [link] is now available.

The NHN Learning Report begins with a discussion of the need for greater mutual support among neighbours to help everyone “age in the right place,” and of how BRN and its partners collaborated to adapt programming for different circumstances.

Part 1: What Did We Do? describes each partners’ demonstration program in detail, alongside spotlights on the people who participated and stories of impacts.

Part 2: So, What Did We Learn? offers insights into the key lessons we collectively learned. We look at the challenges and the successful strategies for engaging neighbours in helping activities both informal and structured, and also at what we learned about the best ways to deliver programming to foster mutual support among residents. 

Part 3: Now What?  presents BRN’s reflections on the growing importance of resident-led mutual support, and on how we can all best continue to help foster it.