We currently steward three Community Councils, in partnership with local partners:
Needham Resilience Network | Needham, MA
The Needham Resilience Network (NRN) is where this work began. In 2022,, we launched a pilot network in Needham and surveyed 536 residents—a sample built to reflect the town by gender, race, and age—about connection and belonging.
One finding shaped everything that followed: people who felt a stronger sense of belonging were also more likely to feel satisfied with their community. In fact, belonging explained these differences better than income, age, stress, or how long someone had lived in Needham. We looked at belonging through three lenses: feeling connected to others, feeling safe being yourself, and feeling like you have a say in your community. We also found that residents who were a racial minority in town, or whose friend groups looked mostly like themselves, tended to feel less belonging.
The Network put that data to work. Ambassadors who experienced belonging very differently, in the same town, shared their stories and broadened how NRN understood its own community. The Town expanded how it reports data by race. And because more diverse friendships were linked to more belonging, the Network started creating real opportunities for residents to connect across backgrounds.
Today, NRN brings together formal and informal leaders across Needham—town government, public schools, law enforcement, parks and recreation, and residents—to keep that work going.
Pleasanton Connects | Pleasanton, CA
Pleasanton Connects is a 30-person, cross-sector network—one of the first of its kind in the country built specifically to strengthen local social connection. It launched in June 2025, sparked by Workday Foundation and the City of Pleasanton, with TogetherUp helping design and guide the process from the start.
We began by mapping the sectors, institutions, and groups that make up Pleasanton, then ran a full listening tour: 38 in-depth interviews and a survey of more than 1,000 residents, to understand where connection was strong, where it wasn’t, and what people hoped for. From there, we recruited a 30-person table of residents, sector leaders, and city officials—Pleasanton Connects’ Connection Ambassadors, who serve as a bridge to and from the communities they represent.
Over their first six months, Ambassadors built relationships across difference, strengthened skills for working across backgrounds, studied local data together, looked at what’s worked in other communities, and co-created a Community Action Plan for Pleasanton. Implementation is just getting started, and the impact is already visible: Ambassadors report wider social networks, deeper cross-sector relationships, and a stronger sense that they can shape what happens next—habits that are starting to ripple out into their own organizations and the wider city.
The Network’s first public moment came on June 6, when Pleasanton Connects helped bring 1,300 residents together for the city’s first Longest Table—one long table stretching down Main Street. Ninety-five percent of attendees said they made at least one new connection that night; 79% said one of those connections was with someone from a different background than their own.
Generations Coalition | New Orleans, LA
Led by the SEE CHANGE Collective, GENERATIONS is a narrative change campaign that brings residents and leaders together around a shared vision: a Greater New Orleans where families can build wealth, children have the opportunity to thrive, and people of every background can afford to remain rooted in the region they call home.
TogetherUp helped build the relationships, shared purpose, and community capacity needed to expand a cross-sector coalition, surface and translate a shared vision into coordinated action based in a targeted universalism approach, and create the GENERATIONS campaign. Its work focuses on three universal goals: increasing the percentage of local homeowners, increasing baseline wages and income, and increasing small businesses and entrepreneurship.
GENERATIONS is grounded in a simple belief: the homes, businesses, opportunities, and trust a community builds together can create lasting change—for today’s residents and generations to come.
Bring a community council to your community
Interested in establishing a community council where you live? We work with municipal and civic leaders to assess local needs, design a hub built around your community’s specific stakeholders, and track its impact over time.
If you’re a municipal leader, funder, or community leader who wants to bring this home, we’d love to talk about what it could look like where you live.
Imagine your town a few years from now. Neighbors who actually know each other. Leaders who trust each other enough to solve hard problems together instead of past each other. A place that feels like…
This is the kind of relational infrastructure a community council can build, starting now.