Liz Cahill was born and raised in Philadelphia. Her whole family is from Philadelphia, going back generations. One day, she was offered an internship in the Bay Area and decided to make the leap, despite not knowing anything about it or anyone there.

“I said goodbye to everything I knew and loved in Philadelphia and came to the Bay. Not knowing a soul.”

When she arrived, it hit her. “I was like, wow, I’m in a place that like, literally nobody knows me. So if I am dead in a ditch, like nobody will figure it out for a long time.”

This could have been a story of loneliness and disconnection, but it wasn’t, because someone took her under their wings—actually two strangers, her roommates Lauren and Deirdre. “They took me in and welcomed me and brought me into their whole social world, which showed me so much love.”

This isn’t the experience for most people. Darilys Matos Acevedo grew up in Puerto Rico. “In Puerto Rico, a stranger talks to you all the time. If you went down the street and you talked to somebody, if you made eye contact . . . you had to smile at them or you said good morning or good afternoon.”

Then she moved to Boston for graduate school. “I had never even visited the place. I knew nobody here.” And where she got smiles and small talk in Puerto Rico, in Boston she “got glares.” “And I’m like, oh, OK. You don’t do any of that here.” It was painful and created a large void in her life.

As Darilys talked to other Latinos in Boston, she assumed “I’m the only one who feels this way, but I wasn’t. There was like a whole group of people that felt like that.”

Their stories are different, but they reveal the same truth.

Moving doesn’t simply change where we live. It interrupts the invisible web of relationships that makes everyday life feel familiar, that makes us feel like we belong. And the majority of the 13 million American adults who move each year experience this.

At the US Chamber of Connection, our recent study on social connection in America explored the impact of life transitions on social connection. It found that 40% of people navigating a relocation struggle with social connection, and they report 35% more barriers to connection compared to everyone else. Two of the most common barriers are not knowing where to start and not wanting to go out alone.

The impact is lasting, as someone shared with us. “Two years ago, I was going on a vacation, and I could not find ONE neighbor to water my plants while I was away. I had lived in this building on and off for over 15 years. I was mortified. How could it be that I had nobody in my building to help with such a small task?”

The invisible cost of a new address

Moving ranks among the most stressful life events a person can experience, on par with divorce and job loss. But the stress isn’t just logistical; it’s psychological. Moving severs the informal ties and daily routines that quietly anchor our sense of who we are and where we belong. The result is a predictable but rarely named experience: not just loneliness, but identity dislocation. The question isn’t only “who do I know here?” but “who am I here?”

To understand the scale of that loss, consider what a typical adult social network requires to build: roughly 200 hours to develop a close friend, 90 hours for a friend, and five hours of repeated interaction for each of the weak ties (neighbors, familiar faces, community contacts) that make daily life feel anchored. A typical adult carries around 1,300 hours of accumulated relationship time. When you move, you leave all of it behind and start from zero.

This is also, paradoxically, what makes the first year after a move one of the most powerful windows for connection. Disruption breaks old habits and makes people unusually open to forming new ones, a phenomenon researchers call the habit discontinuity effect. People who have just moved are more likely to join things, try things, and reach out than they were six months earlier at home.

What closes that window isn’t lack of desire. Research by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago finds that people systematically underestimate how much strangers want to connect and overestimate how awkward the attempt will be. Both the newcomer and the potential neighbor hold back, each assuming the other isn’t interested. Both tend to be wrong.

And the effects of getting it right last longer than most people expect. Vanessa Elias, the founder of Block Party USA, shared with us the story of a neighbor who brought her family a pie when she moved in as a six year old. She remembers her name, Mrs. Fisher, decades later.

Creative experiments welcoming people across the country

What would happen if welcoming became a civic practice instead of an individual virtue? This year, the US Chamber of Connection recruited over 250 people across 25 states to run creative experiments that aimed to help others feel more welcome in their neighborhoods. They were trained on the science of connection and worked together across the country to support each other. We call them the Welcome Committee.

For many of the volunteers, they signed up because they had an experience like Liz. One shared that “when we arrived to our new town we felt welcomed, surprised, and alive through these touches, and wanted to build more.” Or as another volunteer explained, “people are still welcoming me and I still feel at home here. So it gave me this strong sense of duty to pay that forward. I wanna create spaces where people can land and feel comfortable.”

For others, it came from an experience more akin to Darilys’s. “I would have loved to find this kind of thing when I moved,” shared one early volunteer. “I’ve been in my neighborhood and city since 2019 and have yet to make close friends in the neighborhood or city where I live. It feels scary and uncomfortable to get out there. But I’m realizing the huge impact of not having close friends. I’m ready to make the effort. Because if I’m feeling this way, I can’t be the only one.”

They each began by inviting a neighbor for a conversation. They shared their stories of their neighborhoods growing up. Dreamed about the ideal neighborhood together. Explored the Six Points of Connection, a clear and actionable checklist for individuals and leaders to define and strengthen social bonds. And then they explored how they might together make the neighborhood more connected.

They ran some creative experiments. Lindsay turned their suburban garage door into a community message board. Kaitlin created a traveling tin of homemade baked goods that moves neighbor to neighbor down the street, each recipient required to bake something and pass it on to someone new. Sarah hosted a gathering for other people named Sara(h) in her town. Courtney started flyering the neighborhood to organize a dog gathering in someone’s backyard. Nithya left a flower and a handwritten note for each of the five nearest neighbors inviting them to coffee.

Many of the volunteers nostalgically tried things they remembered from their childhood or had seen in a movie. Kate moved an iron chair and table to her front step and started having her morning coffee there facing the street. Jon made lemonade with his kids and set out donuts for anyone walking by. Chet started introducing himself on his daily dog walks. Anne organized a multi-household yard sale across eight houses. And many of them hosted potlucks and block parties.

They all expressed knowing “how meaningful it can be to walk into a new space and find someone who is genuinely glad you are there.” And they wanted to make people feel that way.

Four ways to support newcomers

As the volunteers conducted their experiments, they began to share their findings. They mirrored much of what we have learned from social scientists over the last 50 years. Four themes emerged that help to inform how we can all do more to help new residents, and any neighbor, feel more welcomed.

  1. The first step is the most important. Stop playing “invite chicken.” Many of our volunteers shared a version of the same experience: sitting at home hoping someone would call and invite them to hang out, attend an event, or even just watch Netflix together. They assumed that the people they wanted to call were probably busy or uninterested. Those people were likely sitting at home thinking the same thing. Nobody called. Everyone stayed alone.

Call it invite chicken: a standoff where everyone loses despite everyone wanting the same thing. The barrier isn’t reality; it’s anticipation. Someone just has to go first.

And sometimes, when we do break the game of chicken, we don’t get the response we wanted. When Hazel hosted her first neighborhood coffee gathering, one neighbor texted that he was too nervous to come. She didn’t give up. She texted back encouraging him. He came. At one of Elizabeth’s gatherings in San Diego, a man had been dragged along by his wife, who promised they’d stay just five minutes. He was the last to leave.

We are poor forecasters of our own social experiences. People overweight the discomfort of initiation and underweight the pleasure of connection. The host who sends the follow-up text, the wife who insists on five minutes, isn’t being pushy. They’re correcting for a cognitive error the reluctant person can’t see from the inside.

  1. We are more motivated working together. Partner with someone. Erin hosted a neighborhood gathering in New York City and reflected afterward on what she’d do differently. Her top lesson: “I appreciated the help I did get from neighbors and wished I’d had a co-planner to share more of the work with.”

This is consistent with what research finds: People are significantly more likely to initiate and sustain kind and helpful behavior when they’re doing it alongside someone else. A partner doesn’t just make the work easier; they make follow-through more likely, because the social cost of backing out now involves someone else. Several Welcome Committee volunteers named the US Chamber of Connection cohort itself as the thing that got them out the door. Not the training, not the tools, but the fact that others were doing it, too.

  1. We gain comfort with repeat exposure. Build a rhythm. Hansen has been hosting a monthly porch gathering (coffee, bagels, same spot) for two years. Recently, he watched neighbors spontaneously make plans to go cycling together and quietly organize to look out for a boy on the street whose father is dying of cancer. Neither of those things was planned. They happened because the same people had been attending his events and they had built comfort with each other. Hansen didn’t suggest they help the boy but had created the environment for it to be possible.

Research finds that repeated contact with the same faces makes us like and trust them more, independent of what’s said. Those repeated encounters build weak ties, which are how people find help in a crisis, how trust spreads beyond close friends, how a community starts to look out for itself. The first gathering gets you in the door. Showing up again is what builds the neighborhood.

  1. Spontaneous actions of connection are powerful. Look for opportunities. The best welcoming often isn’t planned. When a neighbor left cookies on Kaitlin’s porch with a note that just said “happy spring,” the gesture was small, spontaneous, and agenda-free. It didn’t just make her smile; it made her want to pass something on. Walking through her neighborhood, Annie spotted a moving van, walked straight over, and introduced herself as a Welcome Committee member. The mover, who didn’t even live there, told her he wished he could move into the community. Another volunteer simply invited people they saw running to join their running group. They were seen and welcomed.

What these moments share is spontaneity and clarity of intent. Research finds that unexpected gestures create a positive disruption that formal invitations don’t. They bypass the social calculation people run when a stranger approaches, and they signal warmth without asking for anything back. Research finds that being noticed is the precondition for feeling like you belong.

And having a clear role removes the ambiguity that makes first moves feel risky. When Annie said “I’m a Welcome Committee member,” her motives were transparent before she said another word. You don’t need a plan. You need to look up.

Connection is a lifestyle—a rewarding one

Giving to others produces more sustained well-being than spending on yourself. The helper’s high is real. Welcoming a newcomer isn’t just a form of service; it’s one of the highest-return social investments you can make.

Liz knows this firsthand. The woman who arrived in the Bay Area not knowing a soul, wondering if anyone would notice if she disappeared, is now the person who creates spaces for others to land. “People here took a chance on me,” she says. “So it gave me this strong sense of duty to pay that forward. I want to create spaces where people can land and feel comfortable.”

All friendships begin the same way: by talking to strangers. Someone just has to go first. Years later, Liz became the person who notices.