52 Weeks of Neighboring - Week 23

Neighboring Tip of the Week - Visit your local convenience store, allow a person to go ahead of you to checkout.

Hey friends!

This week, we’re presenting a neighboring tip with two parts….

First, we encourage you to visit your neighborhood convenience store. This might seem like a strange tip, but convenience stores are incredible places of connection! One amazing example of neighboring in the music theatre world can be found in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights, where the musical’s protagonist, Usnavi, runs the neighborhood bodega. The store is the neighborhood’s nexus of connection, facilitated by Usnavi - the connector - and it’s a beautiful thing to witness. Regardless of how similar this looks to your neighborhood convenience store, it’s still a place where you can bump into neighbors and also an asset in your neighborhood that you can financially support.

Second, we encourage you to allow someone else to go ahead of you when you’re checking out. If you’re not planning to buy anything, maybe you just hold the door for people. However this looks, we would encourage you to be outgoing and kind. Who knows, you might run into some of your actual neighbors! And even if you don’t, we know that small acts of kindness can brighten someone’s day. We also know that these acts change peoples’ perceptions of places, so even if you are interacting with someone who lives outside the neighborhood, perhaps they will start to think even more positively about the neighborhood in which you live. Who knows, but kindness goes a long way, regardless!

Happy Neighboring!

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