If you needed to borrow a cup of sugar, would you know where to turn? Maybe not, thanks to a number of factors, including technology, that are pulling people from their front porches. But Nextdoor — a free social network — aims to prove that technology can also be a part of the solution when it comes to creating and strengthening community.
“It’s not that people don’t want to talk to their neighbors, it’s that they don’t know each other….They don’t know how to start that conversation,” says Sarah Leary, co-founder of Nextdoor.com. “We needed to create a platform that would solve the real problems that people faced everyday in their neighborhood.”
Nextdoor started in Menlo Park, Calif., but the site now covers more than 30,000 neighborhoods across the country, allowing residents to help each other, whether it be finding a reliable babysitter, looking for a lost pet or preventing crimes in the community. “The neighborhood is actually the original social network,” Leary says. “We’re incredibly proud to create a platform where people are just following their natural instincts to look out for each other and help each other…. We’re just making that a lot easier.”