What if there was a simple alternative where every child in Long Beach could walk outside their front door and play safely and freely with their friends? Play Streets Long Beach is a new resident-led initiative that empowers neighbors across Long Beach to temporarily transform their streets into accessible, car-free environments for neighbors of all […]
By Scott Jones What is Hospitality? For many of us today showing hospitality is having friends and family over for a weekend BBQ or for a delicious dinner. It is opening up our homes, and being skilled at entertaining. Others might connect hospitality to the quality of service experienced at a fancy restaurant or a […]
By Scott Jones A few years ago some good friends and I moved to the Willmore City neighborhood across the street from Drake Park. Our new home was a stone’s throw away from the LA River, and next door to the historical Bembridge House. One of the reasons we moved into the neighborhood was to […]
This is community Pumpkin Potluck on the West Side of Long Beach to gather neighbors together. Written by Scott M. Jones, Executive Director of We Love Long Beach What is community? 1. Community as place. 2. Community as relationships 3. Community as discovery 1. Community is centered around living well together in a place. Community […]
We are thrilled to be partnering with the Art Theater Long Beach to show this important documentary SUMMER IN THE FORREST on Sunday, 4/29 at 11:00am at the Art Theater. SUMMER IN THE FORREST is about Jean Vanier, who founded L’Arche in the 1960s as community near Paris that has become home to many men […]
What if everyone in Long Beach wanted to gather together to make a tangible difference in our city? Where would you start? Wouldn’t you start where you live? Wouldn’t you start by teaming up with the neighbors around you who care about your neighborhood too? This seems like the simple, logical first step to making […]
In this WLLB blog post we had the privilege to interview SoCO neighbor Darlene Martin, who hosted her very first neighbor event in her front driveway last Friday for the South of Conant neighborhood’s weekly-monthly Front Yard Friday celebration. Thank you Darlene for being a leader on your block. I hope you get to experience […]
In the Fall of 2013 we had a crazy idea. What if we could create new rhythms of neighborliness centered around the four seasons? These rhythms could be easy on ramps to get to know new neighbors, and regularly reconnect with neighbors we already knew. Generally holidays like Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are centered around […]
I recently had the opportunity to interview Christine Gibson, one of the co-founders of the SoCo Neighbors group about their fresh approach to enlivening neighborliness in the South of Conant Neighborhood. The hope of this interview is to show residents what “relationship centered” neighborhood associations can unleash in every neighborhood in Long Beach. We hope […]
Going door to door on your block and inviting neighbors to your front yard for a Citywide Event is not easy. We know that going up to a neighbor’s door, who is a stranger, can be one scariest things a person can do. It can be even scarier than public speaking, snakes, and spiders. One […]