Building the Capacity of Neighborhoods and the Resilience of Neighbors to Respond to COVID-19: The Neighbor to Neighbor Volunteer Corps

Gordon, Stacey; Gonzales, Ernest; Hinton, Jillian

This chapter describes the development of the Neighbor to Neighbor Volunteer Corps (“N2N”) at a major New York City-based university in March, 2020, during the COVID-19 global pandemic. N2N is a civic engagement program to assist neighbors in university Faculty Housing with basic needs, mental health, and social isolation. The objectives of this chapter are to (a) explicate a conceptual framework within an historical context, along with important guiding values that helped to build the university’s capacity to respond to COVID-19; (b) identify at-risk populations among a heterogeneous population, acknowledging the diversity of residents in the neighborhood; (c) discuss programmatic elements of the project, specifically the ways in which the shared trauma of COVID-19 helped build resilience among the neighbors involved in the project; and (d) discuss how this intervention at the community level contributes to the larger knowledge base of macro-, mezzo-, and micro-discussions of productive aging and clinical social work practice.