Neighborhood party: it’s up to you to play and organize your own neighborhood party on June 1st

For the 2024 edition of the Neighborhood Festival, the Espace MUNI organization invites people to organize neighborhood parties in their image, next Saturday, June 1.

And it doesn’t necessarily need to be a large-scale event, which incurs significant costs, far from it.

“It can really be quite simple,” assures us the spokesperson for the Neighborhood Festival, Vanessa Pilon.

Potluck, picnic, barbecue, pocket or pétanque tournament: all the reasons are good to get together with the neighbors of your street, your apartment building or your neighborhood. The Neighborhood Festival – commonly called the Neighbors’ Day – has allowed this type of meeting for 18 years. In short, the idea is essentially to find an excuse to get together and build relationships with people living near you.

“That’s a bit of the idea this year, it’s to say ‘we break the ice and we create connections’”, summarizes the TV host.

In his eyes, “we must create these opportunities”, at a time when impromptu exchanges are less frequent than before. Since Vanessa became a mother, she has realized the importance of being part of a safe, supportive community, “to be able to help each other,” she says.

“Knowing the people close to us generates a feeling of trust which is very important when you are a parent. »

The event is also an opportunity to involve people who most need to fraternize with others. In Canada, 1 in 3 people suffer from loneliness, a revealing statistic for Ms. Pilon.

“Including them is a great gesture of solidarity. Thinking about it, I think it’s important too. »

Vanessa Pilon is spokesperson for the Neighborhood Festival.
Photo credit: Vanessa Pilon Facebook page

Current registration period

For your party to be part of the official program, you simply have to register it on the Espace MUNI website. Last year, 155 municipalities registered for the Neighborhood Festival. In 2023, some 800 festivals took place in 17 regions of the province and more than 25,000 citizens took part in the various festivities.

“The goal is to create a movement, to see how we involve, in the four corners of Quebec, all kinds of municipalities, at different scales, whether in an urban or more rural environment,” concludes Vanessa Pilon.

For the little story…

Neighbors Day was established in 1999 in France after an elderly person was found dead two months after dying alone. Today, around thirty countries celebrate this annual event.

In 2006, the Quebec Network of Healthy Cities and Villages implemented Neighbors Day in Quebec. Born from the merger between this network and the Carrefour action municipal et famille, the NPO Espace MUNI has overseen the initiative since 2021.