The Town That Runs on Neighbors: Why Collingswood Keeps Showing Up

COLLINGSWOOD — There’s a version of this town that shows up in the real estate listings and the “best places to live” roundups: the walkable downtown, the farmers market, the restaurants that draw people over the bridge on a Friday night. It’s a nice version, and most of it is true. But it isn’t the version I think about when someone asks me why Collingswood works. The version I think about is a folding table.

A stack of unglamorous favors

Behind almost everything that makes this borough hum — the festivals, the parade, the market, the block parties — there’s a folding table somewhere with a clipboard on it and a person standing behind it who is not getting paid to be there. Collingswood is a town built on volunteer labor, and I mean that literally. Its festivals and its civic organizations run on residents who decided that “somebody should do something about that” was a sentence that ended with them.

A whole-town World Cup

You could see it plainly earlier this summer, when the FIFA World Cup final turned into a whole-town event. Lt. Governor Dale Caldwell joined the Camden County commissioners and hundreds of South Jersey soccer fans in Collingswood for a watch party thrown right out in the open — a block party built around a soccer match. Nobody needed a reason bigger than “let’s all be in the same place at the same time.” That instinct, the one that turns a TV broadcast into a street full of neighbors, is the thing you can’t fake and can’t buy.

Rock the Block

You could see it a few weeks before that, too, when more than a hundred volunteers fanned out across West Collingswood for a Habitat for Humanity “Rock the Block” day, partnering with the borough to take on the unglamorous work of caring for a neighborhood — painting tired exteriors, cleaning up landscaping, handling the small repairs that a lot of older homeowners can’t manage on their own anymore. There’s no ribbon to cut on a day like that. No podium. Just a hundred people who gave up a Saturday to make a few of their neighbors’ houses a little easier to live in.

The best thank-you you can give them isn’t a plaque. It’s your name on a sign-up sheet.Max Cedar

One generation from forgetting

Here’s the quiet worry underneath the good news. Volunteer towns are always one generation away from forgetting how to be one. The folks who’ve run the festival committee and the civic groups for decades are getting older, and the borough has been openly looking for new hands — new members for the organizations and festivals that make the place what it is. A town that runs on neighbors only keeps running if the next set of neighbors steps up before the current one steps back.

If you live here, you already know who I’m talking about. The woman who’s worked the same festival booth since her kids were small. The retired guy who somehow ends up directing parking at every event whether anyone asked him to or not. They are the reason your town feels like a town and not just a zip code. Collingswood didn’t get this way by accident, and it won’t stay this way by accident either. It stays this way one folding table at a time.

Based on reporting from Camden County, Habitat for Humanity of South Central New Jersey, and Collingswood.com, and Neighborhood Gazette reporting. The Neighborhood Gazette covers South Jersey at neighborhoodgazette.town.