There are some ideas that seem so simple, we almost miss how revolutionary they are. One such idea has been ringing in my ears ever since my latest conversation with Michael Wood-Lewis, co-founder of Front Porch Forum, the Vermont-born platform that has quietly become part of the social fabric of our entire state:

Humans do better when they know their neighbors.

If you live in Vermont, you already know what I mean; Front Porch Forum is where you find the lost dog, the good roofer, the school board meeting, the free canoe, the warning about a washed-out road, or even the extra rhubarb or the local library event.

And sometimes—if you’re lucky—a reason to believe in people all over again.

If you don’t live in Vermont, don’t tune out, because this conversation wasn’t really about a website; it was about what becomes possible when we design our communities, our technology, and our daily habits around decency.

Michael Wood-Lewis Gives a Tour of the Front Porch Forum

In a world where so much of our online life has been engineered to keep us outraged, distracted, suspicious, and alone, Front Porch Forum is a startlingly different model. It is slow by design, local by design, human by design. It does not try to pull us into a national shouting match or reward the loudest, meanest, most divisive voice in the room. 

Instead, it asks a wonderfully old-fashioned question: What’s on the minds of your neighbors?

And my goodness, what a powerful question that turns out to be.

Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife, Valerie, began the earliest version of Front Porch Forum in their own Burlington neighborhood more than two decades ago. Today, it serves every town in Vermont. The platform has about 250,000 active members in a state with roughly 270,000 households—that is well past the point of a cute little coffee-shop-bulletin-board. 

At this point, Front Porch Forum is part of Vermont’s social infrastructure.

Even more remarkable? A recent survey found that 89% of Front Porch Forum members take action in their local community multiple times a year because of something they read there. That might mean recommending a plumber, showing up at a town meeting, helping after a flood, offering a used appliance to someone who needs it, or even simply answering a neighbor’s question with kindness.

Think about that for a moment: at a time when so many people feel helpless about the state of the world, Front Porch Forum is a quiet, practical system that nudges people from isolation into participation. It makes neighborliness easier to practice.

Making It Easier to Be a Neighbor

The little things often build the trust required for the big things. When you borrow a bicycle, recommend a roofer, pick up a secondhand canoe, or offer a stack of moving boxes, you’re not just completing a transaction; you are laying down tiny threads of trust. Then, when something harder comes along—a big storm, a zoning issue, a family in crisis, or a town decision that really matters—the people involved are not complete strangers anymore.

They know each other’s names—we’ve helped one another and been helped in kind, and have experienced one another as real people—and that changes everything.

One of the most moving stories Michael shared was about a woman who had recently lost her husband. He had collected music, books, and other beloved things throughout his lifetime, so he posted on Front Porch Forum with real vulnerability, hoping those pieces of his life would not simply end up in a landfill. Her broader community responded in spades, seeing not just “stuff,” but a tender moment in a neighbor’s life, wanting to share pieces of her husband rather than throw them away. 

The best part? Afterwards, she said she felt supported, connected,and less alone.

Michael is an engineer by training, so he appreciates a good spreadsheet. But he also knows that the most important things Front Porch Forum creates are almost impossible to measure: trust, confidence, belonging, resilience, the feeling that your town is not just a place you live, but a web of people you are part of.

Setting The Tone for Respect: Attack the Issue, Not the Person

This kind of online connectedness and community does not happen by accident; it must be meticulously moderated. Michael’s team has clear rules that they enforce on the site, and they take real care to keep the space true to its purpose. People can disagree; they can raise concerns; they can even criticize—but the basic premise behind every moderation rule is simple: attack the issue, not the person.

(Imagine how different our world might feel if more of our public life followed that one rule!)

This is where Front Porch Forum has something to teach all of us, whether or not we ever get to use it. Every family, workplace, neighborhood group, school, church, board, and online space has a tone, and people tend to rise—or fall—to the tone of the space they enter.

Michael compares it to walking into different rooms. You behave one way at a memorial service, another way at a sports bar during a tied World Series game, another way at a block party. The space and the tone of the conversations within tell you what kind of human behavior belongs there.

Front Porch Forum has spent 20 years telling people: this is a place for decency, and people have not disappointed them. In fact, they have surprised them.

Building Systems that Bring Us Back Together

That may be the lesson we need most right now: We are surrounded by systems that assume the worst of us, and then profit when we prove them right—but what if we built more systems that assumed we could be generous, practical, funny, helpful, and kind? What if the digital tools in our lives helped us look up from the screen and back toward each other?

Maybe the future we are longing for does not start with a grand movement. Maybe it starts with something much smaller.

A borrowed ladder.
A found cat.
A local meeting.
A stack of books saved from the landfill.
A neighbor who knows a good roofer.
A teenager who sees that the internet can be human-scale and useful.
A town that remembers how to talk to itself.

Front Porch Forum is not just showing us a better way to communicate. It is reminding us of something we already know deep down: when we know our neighbors, the world gets less frightening; and when we have simple ways to help each other, goodness has somewhere to go.

• Front Porch Forum Website
• CoG Episode: Championing Radical Neighborliness with Michael Wood Lewis (#151)

• 00:00 – Intro and Welcome
• 05:45 – The Power of Neighborliness
• 08:38 – Front Porch Forum vs Big Tech
• 16:00 – Real Stories of Community Connection
• 22:55 – Break
• 25:12 – Redistributing Abundance Through Community
• 29:23 – Why Moderation and Tone Matter Online
• 39:15 – Building Social Infrastructure for Communities
• 47:57 – Surprising Insights From Front Porch Forum Data
• 57:20 – Designing for Decency in Digital Spaces
• 01:18:38 – Why Real-Life Conversations Matter