Hello, ,

As 2023 draws to a close, we are taking some time to reflect on the last twelve months of Hey Neighbour activities and celebrate our collective accomplishments with you. 

With the help of our incredible project partners, funders, and countless colleagues and friends, we’ve elevated the conversation around the importance of building neighbourly social connections in multi-unit housing. You joined us for webinars, workshops, talks and conversations - and we couldn’t have done it all without you.

Among our shared accomplishments this year:

🌱 Employing several incredible, bright research assistants.

🌱 Filling our dream Knowledge Mobilization Specialist position - meet Kit!

🌱 Hosting 3 well-attended public webinars on the connections between health, climate, and intergenerational sociable design with voices across BC and the UK.

🌱 Collaborating with our partners at Happy Cities and local jurisdictions across Metro Vancouver on imagining housing design policies that support wellbeing for all.

🌱 Presenting our work at several in-person and online events such as the annual Housing Central conference in Vancouver, the annual Planning Institute of BC conference, and the SFU Lunch & Learn series.

🌱 Publishing four practice guides, three videos, and other great resources to help residents, building operators and local governments foster social connection in multi-unit housing.

We could not have done this work without each of you who have supported Hey Neighbour this year. Thank you. Stay tuned for more opportunities to connect soon.

Wishing you good health and peace for the new year ahead,

The HNC Team

Rental housing operators and community building

In our work to advance neighbourly social connectedness, we seek to engage with a broad range of housing operators of multi-unit buildings to support them in connecting with residents and building intentional community. Making Connections–an engagement and research project–set out to determine how aware and concerned housing operators are about social isolation and loneliness in their developments, what role they wish to play in advancing neighbourly social connectedness, and what support they need to undertake the work.

‘Housing that Connects Us,’ a conversation with UK innovators

In November, Hey Neighbour and Happy Cities hosted the webinar Housing That Connects Us #2: A conversation with UK innovators, part of the year-long Building Social Connections project in partnership with Simon Fraser University’s Department of Gerontology. We discussed the crucial connection between housing and well-being with the UK’s largest non-market housing operator and a London-based design consultant engaged in shaping development policy.

Building social connections: housing design policies to support well-being for all

Hey Neighbour Collective and Happy Cities are co-leading this three-phase project, in partnership with Simon Fraser University. Over the next year, we will be working with six jurisdictions in Metro Vancouver to co-create new design policies to support wellbeing for residents in multi-unit housing.

Aging in the right place, designing housing for wellbeing and older adults

This project – a collaboration between Hey Neighbour, Happy Cities, and SFU’s Department of Gerontology – builds on decades of research expertise and knowledge on social wellbeing in multi-unit housing, at a time when older adults (55+) are the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian population. Above all, we found that having secure, stable, and affordable tenure is essential for allowing people to age in the right place.

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