Walk With Me, Week Three: What We Build for One Another

Week two ended with one idea: connection often needs an opening.

Week three showed us how often people build those openings on purpose. A porch that faces another porch. A trail between two towns. A community dinner. A case manager who keeps calling after someone moves on. A tradition that tells you someone is expecting you, and you know it.

Over seven days, we traveled from Loveland through Berthoud, Longmont, Boulder, Westminster and Aurora, then turned east across the plains toward Salina, Kansas. We met people grieving a spouse, veterans rebuilding their lives, people finding their way back from addiction and homelessness, a refugee family who found home through food, and more than 150 people who spent a Saturday morning cleaning a creek together.

In every one of those places, we found people building connection with care.

Day 11: Loveland to Berthoud

"Connection to me is living. Sustainability. Staying alive."

A woman at the Berthoud Local Garden Club told us that. Her husband had died of cancer, and the loneliness that followed was profound. She knew herself well enough to know that pulling further away would be dangerous. She needed people. She needed reasons to leave the house. She needed somewhere to belong.

The garden club became one of those places.

Members grow food, learn from local growers and donate hundreds of pounds of produce to a local food bank. They also give each other something harder to measure. For many of the women we met, the club brings structure to a stage of life when other structures have fallen away. Careers end. Children build lives of their own. Spouses die. Days that were once full can suddenly hold long stretches of quiet.

One woman told us about the Knit Wits, a group that meets every Wednesday. About half of its members are widows. They knit. They talk. They check on one another and spend time with people who understand parts of their lives without needing much explanation.

Another woman told us her son encouraged her to get a dog during an especially lonely stretch. The companionship mattered. So did the responsibility. The dog needed to eat and needed to go outside, and that gave her a reason to get moving on days when staying home felt tempting.

The thread through all of it was purpose. A garden. A knitting circle. A dog waiting by the door. Each one is a reason to get up, go somewhere, contribute something and run into other people.

That night, the garden club gathered around food, one of the quiet themes of this journey. A shared meal makes time. It keeps people at the table. It gives conversation somewhere to happen.

Day 12: Berthoud to Longmont

The next day, we saw how much thought can go into creating a place where someone feels safe enough to begin again.

At Veterans Community Project in Longmont, the design tells part of the story before anyone explains the program. The homes face one another. Covered porches give residents somewhere to sit and talk with neighbors. A fire pit, shared spaces and a community garden invite people to spend time together. Every resident also has a private home and the dignity that comes with it.

More than 5,000 people from the surrounding community helped build the village, and volunteers keep returning to prepare homes for new residents. The furniture is new, and when residents move on, everything that isn't bolted down goes with them. Custom quilts are stitched with their names.

The message is clear. You matter enough for this to be yours.

One story showed us what all that care can make possible.

A woman veteran arrived at the village after staying in a shelter. At first, she slept much of the time and wanted little to do with the people around her. Her case manager had to encourage her to come outside. Slowly, she began attending events, mostly staying quiet.

Then the community garden arrived.

She started helping. Her involvement grew. Eventually she became the garden's leader, sharing what residents had grown together and finding her voice in front of others.

When she recently moved on to her next chapter, she didn't want to leave quietly. She asked for her celebration to happen at a community dinner so she could speak to the people who had become part of her life. She still comes back to help with the garden.

Trust and friendship built up slowly, one week at a time, until she felt safe.

Veterans Community Project keeps that going after people leave. Staff keep checking in, and community dinners bring veterans together with neighbors and local groups. Housing is where it begins. The goal is a life with somewhere, and someone, to turn to.

Day 13: Longmont to Boulder

On Wednesday, we set out toward Boulder on the LOBO Trail with friends and longtime supporters of The Cost of Loneliness Project. Hours of walking gave us what hours of walking always seem to give us: the kind of conversations that only happen when nobody is rushing to the next thing.

That evening, the Boulder County Farmers Market gave us space for a table and a postcard-writing station. We added a canvas with one question about what connection means.

People kept stopping to answer.

"Showing up."

"Practicing empathy."

"Knowing someone's name and using it often."

Each answer said a lot about what people want from one another. To be remembered. To be noticed. To know someone cared enough to learn your name and use it the next time they saw you.

A hospice leader talked with us about keeping the people in her care connected. One woman happily wrote postcards and told us how nice it is to get something in the mail that isn't a bill. And we met the people behind Be Like Ellie, a foundation created in memory of a young girl whose way of moving through the world made people feel seen and cared for. Their work invites everyone else to carry that spirit forward.

By the end of the evening, the canvas was full. So many answers pointed the same way. Connection often shows up as attention.

Day 14: Boulder

Thursday began at Eldorado Canyon State Park, where we watched climbers depend on one another and call out, "I've got you."

We met Shirin and Lynn, whose friendship began with a conversation that stretched to five hours. More than a year later, one of them described their friendship in terms of safety and trust. And we met William, a park volunteer who remembered Lucy asking how he was doing earlier that morning, because he could tell she really wanted to know.

That afternoon, we met Dr. Jill Litt at Denver Urban Gardens' Horse Barn Community Garden. Jill is a professor of environmental health at CU Boulder who has spent more than two decades studying how the places around us shape our health and our relationships. She also leads RECETAS, an international research project studying nature-based social prescribing and loneliness.

"I think belonging and matter are the epicenter of everything," she told us.

Jill believes we need to get more comfortable naming loneliness, because naming it gives us a chance to do something about it. She also stretched our idea of what a garden can be.

"The place of a garden is an agent of change."

A community garden can become the beating heart of a neighborhood, she explained, because people have a reason to return to the same place, work side by side and become familiar over time. Libraries, parks, sidewalks and walkable streets can do that too.

Her work on social prescribing asks health care providers to look past a symptom and consider what else is happening in a person's life. Sometimes poor health comes with loneliness, a loss of purpose or a feeling of being cut off. Making room for someone to talk about those things can mean a great deal on its own.

Now Jill is focused on what comes next. "We're now seeking a 2.0," she said. "The hard work is now. Take the research and put it into action."

The canyon that morning had shown us her ideas in motion. Places matter. So does what people do for each other once they're there.

Day 15: Boulder to Westminster

Friday was one of the most emotional days of the journey so far.

We began at Bridge House Ready to Work in Boulder, where Stephanie trusted us with a story of addiction, abuse, homelessness and years of feeling she had lost any clear sense of who she was.

Her 23-year-old son had gone through Ready to Work before her. When Stephanie became homeless, he pushed her to give the program a chance. She isn't sure she would have come without him.

Today, she talks about having a reason to wake up again. She's reconnecting with family and starting to recognize her own strengths.

"Connection starts within yourself," she told us.

At Bridge House, residents cook together, spend time together and learn how to have fun without substances, surrounded by other people working to live differently too. Being there, she said, reminds her that she is seen and valued.

Behavioral health case manager Alexis Dahl described the work as "changing culture one conversation at a time." Many people arrive after relationships have been damaged in every direction. Trust has to be earned, and Bridge House earns it through consistency, including support that continues after people graduate.

Then we met Shane.

Shane went through the program himself and now works there. He spent much of his adult life struggling with addiction and homelessness, and he tries to check on clients every day because he remembers what he wanted back then.

A hello. Someone asking how he was doing. Someone who saw him as a person.

That evening in Westminster, we found some of the same ideas at work in a theater. SIP is an immersive theater experience created by Culture House Immersive and produced locally by The Catamounts. We met Mikhael Tara Garver of Culture House and Amanda Berg Wilson, co-founder and artistic director of The Catamounts.

For Mikhael, loneliness and belonging are part of the design from the start. One question behind her work is what would need to happen for someone who walks in feeling lonely to walk out feeling part of a community. SIP uses story, ritual, tasting, performers and participation to give strangers reasons to notice and talk to one another.

Bridge House and SIP share something we heard all week. Trust, safety, participation and repeated invitations are what turn being near people into connection.

Day 16: Westminster to Aurora

Saturday started before we had anything planned.

As we left Westminster, we saw people all along Clear Creek picking up trash. We stopped and met John, who told us we had walked into A Cleaner Clear, the annual cleanup organized by The Confluences. More than 150 volunteers had come out to care for miles of creek and greenway. The work gave them common ground before anyone needed an introduction.

From there, we continued to Aurora and Mango House. Dr. P.J. Parmar created Mango House after realizing that the refugee families he served as a doctor also needed a place to gather and build new lives. Today, it brings health care, businesses, restaurants and community resources together under one roof.

Our team gathered around Burmese dishes, Middle Eastern specialties, Ethiopian comfort food and more before P.J. introduced us to Mohammad, owner of Jasmine Syrian Food.

Mohammad came to Colorado from Syria in 2017. He remembered the uncertainty of those first months. How would his family learn English? How would they pay rent? What would their lives look like here?

His family kept encouraging one another. Maybe today will be better. Maybe next month will be better.

Work gave Mohammad a way to care for the people he loved. Then Jasmine Syrian Food gave him a way to share where he came from. People tasted his family's food and asked about a dish. Then they asked about Syria. Then they came back. Customers became regulars. Regulars became friends.

"We feel safe and loved," Mohammad told us.

He remembered a day the restaurant unexpectedly had to close. Calls and messages started pouring in from customers checking on the family.

"They care about us."

During COVID, Mohammad told us, his family helped serve more than 9,000 meals to others in the community. A few years after arriving in a new country, they were helping feed their neighbors. And now, when Mohammad isn't where people expect him to be, they notice.

Day 17: Aurora to Salina

Sunday was mostly a driving day. We headed east on I-70, and after days of trails, gardens, markets and porches, the land opened up.

Across eastern Colorado and western Kansas, there were stretches where we could go for miles and see only a house or two. In the 2020 Census, Lincoln County, Colorado, had about two people per square mile.

Isolation is a real concern in rural communities, especially when distance meets aging, transportation challenges and fewer places to gather. People there also find their own ways to stay connected. We wondered where people gather when neighbors live miles apart, and which places become the anchors. We were seeing those communities through a windshield, and the people who live there are the ones who can tell us.

Inside the van, our own conversation took a turn. We started sharing family rituals. Christmas Eve Eve. The dishes that have to be on the Thanksgiving table. Who cooks what. Where everyone gathers. The traditions that have happened so many times nobody needs to explain why they matter.

Families change. People move. Children grow up. Parents age. Then the holiday comes around, and everyone knows they're expected to find their way back to one another.

On a day spent staring at physical distance, we found ourselves talking about the things our families created to close it.

What we're noticing

Three weeks in, we're thinking more about connection as something we can design for.

Homes that face one another. A community garden. A trail between two towns. A program that keeps checking on you after you leave. A theater experience that gives two strangers permission to talk. A building where a doctor's office sits near a Syrian restaurant. A family ritual repeated so many times nobody thinks of it as design at all.

Each of these creates the conditions for connection. From there, people have to walk through the door, sit down at the table, trust someone enough to share part of themselves and keep coming back long enough for a stranger to become familiar.

This week also kept bringing us back to purpose. A garden gave a widow somewhere to go. A veteran found her voice tending something that grew. Work gave Mohammad a reason to believe tomorrow could be better. Stephanie is starting to wake up feeling there is something ahead of her.

Purpose gets us moving. And once we're moving, we tend to run into each other.

Week four takes us deeper into Kansas, briefly into Nebraska and then on to Missouri. We'll keep walking, and we'll keep listening.

If there's someone we should meet along the way, or a place in your community where people already come together, tell us.

And on Nov. 12, join us for the first National Day of Connection. At noon, take 12 minutes with someone you want to know better.