Abstract
This chapter describes the development of the Neighbor to Neighbor Volunteer Corps (“N2N”) at a major New York City-based university in March, 2020, during the COVID-19 global pandemic. N2N is a civic engagement program to assist neighbors in university Faculty Housing with basic needs, mental health, and social isolation. The objectives of this chapter are to (a) explicate a conceptual framework within an historical context, along with important guiding values that helped to build the university’s capacity to respond to COVID-19; (b) identify at-risk populations among a heterogeneous population, acknowledging the diversity of residents in the neighborhood; (c) discuss programmatic elements of the project, specifically the ways in which the shared trauma of COVID-19 helped build resilience among the neighbors involved in the project; and (d) discuss how this intervention at the community level contributes to the larger knowledge base of macro-, mezzo-, and micro-discussions of productive aging and clinical social work practice.
Keywords
- Ageism
- COVID-19 pandemic
- Productive aging
- Civic engagement
- Neighbor to neighbor
- Shared trauma
- Shared resilience
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Gordon, S., Gonzales, E., Hinton, J. (2021). Building the Capacity of Neighborhoods and the Resilience of Neighbors to Respond to COVID-19: The Neighbor to Neighbor Volunteer Corps. In: Tosone, C. (eds) Shared Trauma, Shared Resilience During a Pandemic. Essential Clinical Social Work Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61442-3_22
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