Thought Leadership with Claudia Stallings: Know thy Neighbor

“Won’t you be my neighbor?” sang Mr. Rogers every day on the PBS program, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Along the same lines, from Sesame Street, is the song, Who are the People in your Neighborhood?, a happy song about meeting your neighbors. According to dictionary.com, the word, neighborly means, “characteristic of a good neighbor, especially helpful, friendly or kind.” There’s Neighborhood Watch, which is a program where members of a neighborhood agree to work together to help keep the neighborhood safe. And Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman is, of course, your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.

This year, I attended a luncheon put on by Leadership Knoxville, celebrating leaders in our area who have recently gone through a year-long program learning about our city in a variety of ways. One of the speakers challenged us to get to know our neighbors better to bring about a greater sense of community and foster civility. To do this, we were presented with a grid of three squares going across, and three going down, much like a tic-tac-toe board. The middle square marked our own home.

The challenge included physically knocking on the doors of the homes of our neighbors in front of us, behind us, on both sides, and diagonally in all directions, and get to know the people in those households. The hope is that we’d have better relationships and understanding with eight more families than we may have had before. Then, to keep the relationship going, we were instructed to write our neighbors’ names in the squares around our house and put it on the refrigerator. Then, call our neighbors by name when we see them. Check in on them from time to time. Be “neighborly.”

I usually wave to my neighbors when they are out with their dogs or working in their yard. The neighbor around the corner organizes get-togethers about twice a year and sends helpful emails with neighborhood information. I know the names of the neighbor’s dogs across the street. The neighbor up the street goes to our church so we see them occasionally there. Now I’m Facebook friends with some former neighbors. But I must admit that I do not know much about all the people who go about their lives just a few yards away from me.

Do you know your neighbors? They say that good fences make good neighbors, but are you willing to open the gate to that fence and help establish a greater sense of community in your corner of the world? 

*This article was reprinted with permission from the Knoxville News Sentinel in 2024.