Build a Village
Bottom-up community knowledge. Real voices. Collective power.
We are currently accepting expressions of interest from community groups to join our board.
Who are we?
Build a Village is a community-led civic insight hub.
We work with mutual aid groups, organizers, and neighbors to document the realities, ideas, and solutions that New Yorkers are already creating and make sure those voices shape policy.
We don’t study communities.
We stand with them and strive to uplift their voices.
Where do we work?
Currently our efforts are focused on New York City and neighboring New Jersey.
We do not have the capacity at the moment to operate in other states.
What do we care about?
We care about community empowerment, activism, and civic participation.
While our focus is not limited to the groups and themes below, we have a strong emphasis on elevating the voices of communities that are most marginalized, systematically excluded, profiled, and disenfranchised.
More specifically:
We Care about LGBTQ+ Communities
We stand with queer and trans people who continue to face discrimination, underfunding, and barriers to safety and dignity. We support their right to thrive, express themselves freely, and get access to the resources they deserve.
We Care about Immigrant Communities
We believe immigrants know their own needs best.
We uplift their voices, honor their resilience, and help ensure they can access support without fear, shame, or unnecessary exposure.
We Care About Food and Housing Security
We know that stability begins with full stomachs and safe places to live. We prioritize urgent, everyday needs and help communities support neighbors who are struggling to meet the basics.
We Care about Women and Fems
We support women, feminine, and gender-expansive people who face unique challenges in safety, care, opportunity, and resources. We aim to highlight a wide variety of experiences that are often unheard including those of trans women, women of color, and sex workers.
We Care About Free Speech and Expression
We value the right for all people to share their stories, advocate for their needs, and build power within their own communities. We protect the space for open expression, mutual learning, and collective care.
We Care About Healthcare Access
We believe everyone deserves compassionate, timely, and affordable care. We help individuals facing medical hardship, unexpected costs, chronic conditions, or barriers created by broken systems.
Mission
Build a Village partners with New Yorkers and grassroots communities to document their lived realities, elevate their voices, and transform bottom-up knowledge into collective power. We create spaces where people can speak openly about safety, belonging, and daily life and we work alongside them to bring their insights into the rooms where decisions are made.
We believe:
The people closest to the problem are closest to the solution.
Vision
We envision a city where all people can live safely, openly, and with dignity, and where their knowledge shapes the policies, technologies, and institutions that impact their lives.
A city where community wisdom is valued as expertise, where solutions reflect lived experience, and where every neighborhood is strengthened by the voices of the people who call it home.
What we do
1. We bring people together.
Neighborhood dialogues, listening circles, policy discussions, and trainings/workshops led by community members.
2. We gather community knowledge from the bottom up.
Stories, struggles, ideas, local innovations.
Shared by neighbors, owned by neighbors.
3. We turn insights into impact.
Together, we transform lived experience into:
• community briefs
• neighborhood snapshots
• public dashboards
• policy recommendations
Always created with communities, not about them.
4. We train grassroots groups to lead their own research, run program evaluations, and gather actionable insights.
Simple tools, accessible templates, and full transparency.
Community-controlled, bottom-up data.
5. We strengthen digital and tech capabilities.
We offer community-friendly trainings on:
• using digital tools to support their work
• collecting and managing data safely
• advocating for tech policies that protect and empower them
Technology should work for communities, not threaten or displace them.
We help neighbors gain the skills — and the say — to shape how digital tools impact their futures.
Why it matters
Most decisions are made using top-down information that misses what really happens on the ground.
We build the missing half:
bottom-up civic intelligence straight from the people.
It reveals:
• hidden barriers
• local solutions
• everyday realities
• the true needs of neighborhoods
• what’s working and what isn’t