Happy Community Project Limited’s Vision:

It is normal for neighbours to know, care about and support each other.

Our Purpose:

Shift the culture of Communities so they are happier communities . Happy communities are where people know each other, belong and look out for each other’s wellbeing.

Why Happy Communities Are Important

Communities where we know each other, belong and care for each other have been the foundation of human well being since humans became humans. Maslow’s hierarchy places belonging right next to food and shelter. It is only in recent decades that we have placed self-reliance and individualism as more important than community belonging. And we are learning what a big mistake this has been.

Our own wellbeing and the well being of our children and grandchildren depends on whether our communities provide us with connectedness, belonging and caring.

So how are we achieving this? We have three focused initiatives that raise the importance of community in our lives:

Happy Community Project for Apartment Buildings

Your buildings are the equivalent of a neighbourhood. Happy neighbourhoods are where people know each other and support each other. Statistics Canada says 1 in 8 people are chronically lonely and that people who live in apartments are much more likely to be lonely.

We make it safe and easy for your tenants to know each other so that they can feel comfortable on knocking on a neighbour’s door and asking to borrow a screwdriver.

The upside, it’s good for business and it’s good for society. You will have lower costs, fewer nuisance calls and better ROI.

Effect Change In Your Buildings Now

Good Neighbour Builders for Communities

Neighbours are often afraid to reach out to each other. The reason, it is embedded into our culture to mind our own business, stranger danger and be self-reliant.

We partner with municipalities and / or senior not for profit organizations within a municipality to shift the culture so that it is normal for neighbours to know each other, care about each other and support each other.

This makes for a happier community with fewer social problems, less crime, greater citizen engagement and greater economic activity.

Bring The Project To Your Community

The Good Neighbour App

Healthy, supportive and safe neighbourhoods are where neighbours know each other, support each other and look out for each other. Instead of building relationships online, they build relationships by meeting, talking and getting to know each other.

The Good Neighbour App is an anti-social-media, social app. It’s like the new doorbell where people can call on each other to get together, share news about what is going on and ask for help. It facilitates people connecting with each other the old fashioned way, meeting and talking.

Get The App

Our Genesis story

In 2012, Barry Braun was about to become a grandfather. He was reflecting on his grandchildren’s future in a world of ever increasing chaos, selfishness and divisiveness. He decided to do something about it.

His first attempt was Women Reshaping the World. The idea was that if the world is getting messed up, put somebody else in charge. This was successful in that it attracted and enabled 700 women to commit to making the world a different place. But he couldn’t figure out how to make it financially sustainable.
He met Dr. Bruce Dienes who was an expert in community psychology. After many long discussions, Barry came to understand how important community is to our fundamental well being. After reading many research articles, he concluded there were three factors on which communities could build a sense of well being for its citizenry.

Connectedness across differences
Belonging
Caring for each other

With this knowledge, combined with his own experience of cultural change and human behavior, Barry developed the Happy Community Project program. This program received international acknowledgement for its innovative and effective way of creating a cultural shift within community. He proved its effectiveness in several communities (Windsor NS, Sackville NS, Halifax NS, Stewiacke NS, Kolkata India and Kabale Uganda, and Boulder USA).

But there was still a problem. As effective as it was, it was not easy to scale to many communities. His goal of making it normal for neighbours to know, care about and support each other throughout the developed world needed another approach.

His biggest learnings were that:

community is not an outside job. Communities only work when community citizen take their responsibility as citizens to make their community the community they want. There is no “they should…, there only is we should….”
It becomes scalable and easy to implement when it can be implemented at the scale of neighbourhood throughout a community and is supported by the right kind of technology..

So he built on this experience to launch the Good Neighbour App and Good Neighbour Method in 2023.

Be part of the we should that makes community wellbeing a #1 priority.

“We need to remember our true happiness comes from simple things like: belonging, social connectedness, meaning, sufficiency and safety. If we build our communities around these basic ideas, we and our children can have a better world. They will get the support they need to deal with the future.”
– Barry Braun, Founder

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