Announcing Nextdoor's 2026 Good Neighbor Day honorees

Nextdoor is recognizing five honorees, one from each region of the country, for National Good Neighbor Day on September 28, 2026. They were chosen from more than 1,300 nominations submitted by neighbors between August 25 and September 14.

Good Neighbor Day is a decent moment to recognize the people who show up for the people around them. It is a better moment to notice how many of them there are. We read every nomination that came in this year, and the volume of them is the story.

The five honorees

This year's honorees are Dorea of Raleigh, North Carolina; Bhagwat Gupta of Pearland, Texas; Dan Schaefer of North Liberty, Iowa; Dan Brinsky of Lafayette Township, Pennsylvania; and Karl and Debbie Word of Lake Chelan Valley, Washington. Dorea cooks a free dinner for about a hundred neighbors every Wednesday. Gupta spent twenty years rebuilding a neglected subdivision outside Houston. Schaefer organized meals for a neighbor recovering alone and never stopped taking out her bins. Brinsky plowed a driveway all winter so a woman could get to the hospital to see her husband. The Words mowed a lawn and pruned a rose garden while their neighbor was in surgery an hour away.

Dorea, Raleigh, North Carolina

Dorea cooks a free dinner for about a hundred neighbors every Wednesday, and the whole thing runs on Nextdoor. She started in January 2026 with enough food for four people on a cold night. By late September the project had served more than 2,800 meals.

In May 2025, Dorea nearly died at home. By the time she reached her phone to call 911 she was in acute respiratory failure, and at the hospital doctors found a large clot in her lungs along with several others. Recovery was slow, and it left her with a question she could not put down. If she had not survived, had she made a difference to anyone?

"I realized I didn't want to wait for some big opportunity to make an impact," she says. "I could start right where I was, with something as simple as making sure people had a warm meal."

She calls it Lasagna Wednesdays, though it is not always lasagna. Some weeks there is not time for a dish that takes hours, and families are counting on the food either way, so she cooks something faster instead. This week it was Tuscan-style creamy chicken, one of her daughter Ayah's favorites. Ayah has been part of it since the beginning.

There is a sign-up form so she can plan the cooking, and that is the end of the screening. Nobody is asked whether they deserve it, nobody proves need, and nobody explains themselves. The people picking up include families short on food, homebound elderly neighbors, nurses coming off night shifts, first responders, and neighbors with nowhere to live. About half collect their meals from Dorea's house and volunteers drive the rest out across a dozen zip codes. There is a porch pantry too, shelf-stable donations anyone can take.

The demand has outrun the plan more than once. The sign-up form now fills within four hours of opening, where in April it took until Sunday to reach fifty people. This week the first hundred meals were gone and she made an emergency shopping run to cook thirty-one more before pickup.

"Although we say 90, we usually end up promising around 100 and serving even more, because people show up and it's hard to say no," says Candy Darr, who nominated her and now runs the sign-ups and the delivery assignments. Darr found the project in late June and started out by donating desserts.

"The more I've gotten to know Dorea, the more I believe she's the living definition of selfless," Darr wrote in her nomination. "This project wouldn't exist without her vision and willingness to do whatever it takes in terms of time, money, and physical demands. Although she doesn't seek recognition, she's definitely earned some."

Neither of them takes cash. Donations come as wish-list items or gift cards to specific stores, which is how they have chosen to keep it clean. Dorea is a single mother and covered most of the cost herself for months. She still covers a lot of it and does most of the cooking.

"It isn't really about a piece of lasagna anymore," she says. "It's about what happens when people decide there is enough room at the table for everyone."

Bhagwat Gupta, Pearland, Texas

Bhagwat Gupta spent two decades volunteering in his 400-home neighborhood outside Houston, and the place rebuilt itself under his leadership. The rebuilding is the visible part. The quieter work came first.

For years Autumn Lake could not legally hold its own annual meeting. The community needed 40 proxies to reach quorum, ten percent of its homes, and it kept falling short. Every March, Gupta walked the neighborhood door to door until he had them. His board eventually made him president, a decision Ken McArdle, the neighbor who nominated him, describes as a matter of respect earned over years.

What followed took about five years. Gupta's board fixed what was unsafe around the pool, added a second pool area, built two fishing piers over the lake, put 15-foot lights along the jogging trail so neighbors could walk it after dark, and added a playground and a pavilion. Every capital improvement went to a community vote first. He is a retired professor who knows HOA law cold, and he ran the board the way you would expect of both.

The documentation was his idea. Gupta told the board to photograph every project before and after, so that future boards would have records and so that anyone in the community could see exactly where their money had gone. McArdle, who took most of the photos himself, remembers how Gupta explained it: "This way nobody can say we decided where the money was spent. The community decided, not the board."

During COVID, Gupta set up block captains to check on households across the neighborhood.

McArdle owns a commercial pressure washing business and built the community's website. Gupta taught for a living. Between the two of them, a neglected subdivision outside Houston got its common spaces back.

Dan Schaefer, North Liberty, Iowa

When Ica Shaull came home from three days in the hospital to recover alone, her neighbor Dan Schaefer made sure she never had to ask him twice. He organized his and his wife Stephanie's Bible study and community group at Grace Community Church to bring her meals for weeks. Five months later he is still hauling her trash and recycling bins to the curb every Wednesday and back into her garage afterward.

When her smoke detectors started going off with no warning last week, she texted him what was happening. He came over the same day and took them down so she could get them replaced. Whenever a package arrives too heavy for her to lift, he carries it in.

"The Bible directs me to comfort widows, and to love our neighbors as ourselves," Dan says. "Our Bible study and community group takes this to heart, and Ica is in both of those categories. We saw her leave in the ambulance when she got hurt and knew she'd need help. Since she was right across the street, it was easy to do, and an easy habit to keep."

Stephanie did the organizing behind it, coordinating who would bring meals and when. "She's phenomenal and deserves credit," Dan says.

"If it wasn't for Dan, and a lot of other friends and family, I would not have been able to be at home by myself to recover," Ica wrote in her nomination. "I don't know where I would have ended up." She is still in her own house with her two cats.

Dan Brinsky, Lafayette Township, Pennsylvania

When John Healy was in a rehabilitation hospital with a badly injured leg, heavy snow shut his wife in the house, and his neighbor Dan Brinsky plowed the driveway without anyone asking. He kept plowing it all winter, which is how she got to the hospital to see him and how she got groceries home.

"It needed done, that's all," Dan says. "That's what neighbors do."

Brinsky's sons came by to ask whether anything else needed doing. One of them mowed the lawn in spring, once Healy was home but still struggling to move around. Brinsky and his wife stopped in with farm fresh eggs to check on them and turned down anything offered in return.

The family also grades and patches the community's gravel road all the way out to the state road, the kind of maintenance nobody notices until it stops.

"My wife and I feel truly blessed to have Dan Brinsky as our neighbor," Healy wrote. "I don't know what we would have done without Dan and his family."

Karl and Debbie Word, Lake Chelan Valley, Washington

Roberta Sullivan's husband broke his hip pulling a rototiller out of the garage, and by the time she got home from days at the hospital, her lawn was mowed and every rose in her garden had been pruned. Karl Word was still mowing when she pulled in. Debbie Word had done the roses.

Roberta had called them the day of the fall, after she found her husband several yards from the front door and could not lift him herself. They came over, helped get him into the car, and she drove to the emergency room. Surgery happened an hour away.

Karl kept the lawn mowed for the two months her husband spent in rehab. Through the winter he plows every driveway in the neighborhood and keeps the road drivable.

"Certainly an act of kindness beyond necessity," Roberta wrote. "He is truly an example for all of us."

What 1,300 nominations have in common

The nominations line up with what people told us in a national survey we released the same day. Two thirds of respondents say regular day-to-day interactions are what build trust between neighbors, more than any other answer by a wide margin. Long-term residency came second at 45%.

That is what the nominations look like. Very few describe a single dramatic rescue. Most describe someone who kept doing a small thing for a long time. A meal every Wednesday. A trash can pulled up the driveway every week. A driveway plowed every time it snowed, for a whole season.

Two of this year's honorees, roughly 2,100 miles apart on opposite sides of the country and unknown to each other, gave their neighbors the same answer when they tried to say thank you. Karl Word, in Roberta Sullivan's words, "stuffs it off and insists that's what neighbors do." Dan Brinsky and his wife refused anything offered, John Healy wrote, "saying: 'That's what neighbors do.'"

The survey also found that nearly a third of respondents say trust in their neighborhood has strengthened over the past five years, double the 16% who say it has weakened.

How we chose them

Neighbors submitted nominations on Nextdoor between August 25 and September 14 using #GoodNeighborDay. Each nomination asked what the neighbor did, what impact it had, and whether it brought other people in. Nominations were scored against a consistent rubric, then reviewed by Nextdoor employees, who selected five honorees, one from each U.S. region, based on how specific and lasting the act was and the difference it made.

Every honoree and every nominator agreed to be named publicly before we published anything.

You don't need a program for this

The nominations that stood out this year were mostly written by people who had never told the neighbor in question that what they did mattered. Writing it down was the first time.

Good Neighbor Day is September 28. The rest of it is the other 364 days.