- The Good Neighbour Project started with a straightforward question: what would it actually look like if a corporation tried to be a real urban citizen instead of just writing cheques from a distance? We developed it with Natalie Williams and Suraya Hamdulay of 2U, a global Ed-tech company, and it was grounded in research that CS Studio and the African Centre for Cities had been doing. The whole thing began with mapping, interviews, and surveys—trying to understand the Salt River neighbourhood on its own terms, particularly now that 2U had set up its corporate headquarters there. We also ran internal surveys within the company itself, trying to get a sense of the staff, what they thought, what worried them.
- What came back was interesting: there was no shortage of ideas or energy. Both the Salt River residents and 2U staff could see the same things clearly—youth development, skills training, safe places to play, affordable fresh food, and better coordination between what was already happening. The real problem, though, was simpler and harder. Everything was fragmented. No shared space. No connective tissue. No trusted structure that could actually bring effort and resources together in any meaningful way.
- So we proposed something straightforward: stop thinking like charity. Invest in social infrastructure instead. Use space as the lever. Prototype a six-month pop-up community hub where you could test out new kinds of partnership, new ways of sharing risk and ownership; then see what you’ve learned and build from there.
- The work laid bare something structural that tends to derail well-intentioned initiatives before they even get off the ground. It wasn’t goodwill that was in short supply. Alignment wasn’t the problem either. What mattered—what kept running out—was stability and institutional continuity. As things progressed, the conditions shifted underneath us. The global tech sector tanked. Something like 100,000 jobs disappeared across the industry in a matter of months. 2U felt it, too. Internal restructuring, new leadership, an acquisition—suddenly the company was focused on survival and recovery. Our main contact inside the organisation left during all this. With everyone’s attention turned to layoffs and integration and rebuilding, the space for experimentation just closed up.
- The lesson was hard to miss: if your civic partnership is tied to a single corporate balance sheet, it’s inherently fragile. Local work doesn’t exist in isolation from global economic cycles. Even carefully designed civic initiatives are vulnerable to forces operating at scales far beyond the neighbourhood.
- We also learned that momentum expires fast. When things actually align, you need to move. Without a set of tools ready to adapt and deploy quickly, even strong intention just evaporates.
- That realisation changed what we prioritised. Rather than designing processes from the ground up every time, we started thinking about interventions that could move across institutions instead of being locked inside them.
Natalie Williams
Suraya Hamdulay
