A commons of ways to build community where you live

540 practices, tools, stories and ideas for strengthening the place you live — contributed by neighbors and community builders, connected to each other, credited to the people they came from, and free to remix in Relational Builder.

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Start with a guide

Each guide gathers the practices, tools and stories for one kind of work — pick the one closest to what you're trying to do.

• Community-Building on Your Block

  Block parties, welcome wagons, tool libraries — the practices that make a block a neighborhood, and where to start.

• Civic Media for Your Neighborhood

  How information becomes care work at neighborhood scale — ten recipes and the worksheets to plan yours.

• Building Power with Your Neighbors

  Organizing in the Ganz tradition, hung on six questions — who are my people, what do we care about, what could we do together?

• Civic Tech at Neighborhood Scale

  Open tools remixable for your block — maps, ballots, mutual-aid stacks — and the design lessons from a decade of neighborhood tech.

Browse the whole catalog

• 89 entries

  Recipes

  Practices with steps — follow one on your block this month.

• 50 entries

  Tools

  Working software from real neighborhoods, remixable in the Builder.

• 121 entries

  Stories

  What happened when real people tried this, in their words.

• 29 entries

  Build prompts

  Starting points for building your own version.

• 26 entries

  Frameworks

  The thinking behind the practices, worksheets included.

• 10 entries

  Methodologies

  How the commons gets built — the process itself, documented.

• 215 entries

  References

  The wider library: books, essays and projects we learn from.

Good first reads

• Recipe

  Block Stewards

  Be the neighbor who keeps the block connected. Quietly. Over years.

• Recipe

  Community-Stewarded Stories

  Community-controlled media infrastructure (training, tools, distribution, revenue) so people tell their own stories on their own terms.

• Recipe

  Tool Library

  A library, but for drills, sanders, ladders, sewing machines, and the table saw nobody can afford to own. Neighbors check things out for a…

• Recipe

  Welcome Wagon

  A new family just moved in. Bring something over. Stay five minutes.

How it all connects

Every dot is an entry; every line is a connection a steward confirmed — this practice used in that neighborhood, this tool descended from that one. The commons grows by connection, not just addition.

Explore the full map and timeline →

Want to share a link or doc that highlights a story from your neighborhood?

Add your insights and learnings (and mistakes!) from your neighborhood here. RTP Stewards will tag it to the appropriate Commons collection, gallery or studio. Then, your contribution shapes the journey of other neighborhood stewards around the world!

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