Former President Jimmy Carter proclaimed September 28 as National Good Neighbor Day in 1978. In 2025, Blaine mayor Mary Lou Steward declared September 8 as Good Neighbor Day in Blaine.
The mayor’s announcement was prompted by researchers at Washington State University (WSU) Whatcom County Extension’s Community Health Oriented Resilience Data Science lab. One of those researchers, Shawna Beese, an assistant professor of rural health promotion at WSU Extension with a doctorate in nursing, has a particular interest in community health and how practicing good “neighboring” can help keep people healthy.
According to Beese, a major driver of mortality across the U.S. is chronic disease. Her dissertation was on allostatic load, or chronic stress responses, in a neighborhood context. She found that since people tend to spend the majority of their time in their own neighborhoods, it was a location worth studying through a community health lens.
“As I’ve actually been out there in practice these last three or four years working with different communities, I really started to understand it’s not just neighborhoods where we’re talking about things like built environment and walkability and different environmental protections and risks,” Beese said. “It’s also how we neighbor with each other, that social connection piece that is actually driving a significant amount of those stress indicators that foretell future chronic disease development.”
Across the nation, researchers are looking into how community health ties into our connections with our neighbors. Research shows that in the past 50 years, but especially after the pandemic, there is a desire for deeper neighborhood connections.
“Perhaps we’ve lost some of that muscle of how to be good neighbors with each other, because that’s not been the trend for 50 to 60 years,” Beese said. “We’ve actually grown further apart from our neighbors in the last half century.”
In an effort to reconnect communities, WSU Extension has started an initiative in Whatcom County to promote good interactions with neighbors.
“The idea was to promote this notion of neighboring as a health promotion strategy,” said Kristen Barta, a program specialist in rural health at WSU Extension who is involved with the initiative and holds a doctorate in communications. “It connected us to this national campaign, and it was really a launching point for us to start working within Blaine and Whatcom County more broadly.”
To introduce this concept to the community, Beese will host two classes that are free and open to the public at the Blaine library 3-4 p.m. Wednesday, November 19 and Thursday, November 20. The class on November 19 is “Neighborhood Prevention Science 101,” in which Beese will present the prevention science framework and examine ways in which it can be implemented to mitigate health risks. The class on November 20, “Neighboring as a Health Promotion Strategy,” will consider strategies to aid in improving neighborhood health.
To learn more about the classes at the library, visit wcls.libcal.com. WSU Extension plans to build on this curriculum in the future and hopes other communities find the information from the research conducted to be useful and applicable to them.
“What we’re doing is really providing a framework that can be tailored and adopted in any community,” Barta said.
Blaine-Birch Bay (BBB) Collective is a new implementation and resource council that is working closely with WSU Extension to make this outreach possible.
“This group is an attempt to offer a space for everyone to sit at the same table and connect – to share what they’re working on, to ask for help on projects and to become an actionable resource group,” wrote Pennie Allsop, program specialist at WSU Extension, in an email to The Northern Light. “Attendance continues to grow, so I’m feeling pretty confident that we’re building something sustainable.”
Allsop is also involved with another group, Birch Bay-Blaine Thrives. This group is a youth prevention coalition that meets with prominent members of the community involved with youth, such as the mayor, chief of police and school counselors. The group’s goal is to provide ways to ensure a healthy social environment for youth and families. BBB Collective’s aim is to work with the group to bring these points of discussion to action.
For those who want to get involved with the initiative or learn more about BBB Collective, email Allsop at pennie.allsop@wsu.edu. Updates on the initiative can be found by joining the research lab’s mailing list at labs.wsu.edu/chords.
“As far as I’m concerned, every day should be a good neighbor day,” mayor Steward said. “We are all part of a big community. We need to look out for each other.”
