Mental Health Mates (defunct April 2026 - included as cautionary)
Founder Bryony Gordon's network of monthly Sunday Walk-and-Talks for people with mental-health issues, organized by local volunteer hosts in 150+ UK locations (Cambridge, Royston, Highams Park, etc.). Free, no booking, judgement-free.
A national 'Find a Walk' map showing every host's local walk - the existence/absence of a walk in your town was the visible signal; new towns were celebrated when they spun up.
Each walk was a recurring monthly meeting of the same neighbors building peer support over time, very explicitly a buddy mechanic.
A cautionary tale for BelongHub: a beautifully designed area-by-area community-health network that died despite high engagement because grant funding ran out. Worth flagging in the catalog as 'how not to fund this'.
Others in the same family
Defi Sante (Capsana, Quebec)
Quebec-wide 6-week challenge each spring run by Capsana, asking citizens to commit to '5 portions of fruit/veg, 30 min activity, 2 hours quality sleep daily.' Municipalities sign up to mobilize residents, and the campaign awards 'Municipalites Championnes' status to top-performing towns and pays out ~$20k in prizes for citizen events. 21 municipalities crowned champions in a single recent edition.
Street Tag
A mobile app that turns local streets, parks and landmarks into a virtual playground. Teams of up to six collect location-based tags and activity points by walking, running, cycling or rolling, then climb a seasonal community, school or workplace leaderboard.
INTVL
Self-described as a hybrid running tracker + neighborhood territory game. Smart GPS overlays let runners chase 10K PBs while 'holding down your neighborhood' against other community members.
My Block, My Hood, My City - Neighborhood 5K
Jahmal Cole's nonprofit fights Chicago segregation by physically moving young people across neighborhoods. The 5K randomly assigns each run group a different neighborhood to run through; Explorers takes after-school cohorts from one South/West Side block to enrichment activities in other parts of the city.
We Give Blood Drive (Big Ten / Abbott)
Annual Aug-Dec competition where 20+ Big Ten universities (and by extension their host cities/regions - Lincoln NE, State College PA, Madison WI, etc.) compete to collect the most blood donations from their student/community base. The winning school's community gets $1m from Abbott for student/community health. 2024 winner Nebraska collected enough donations to save ~60,000 lives across Big Ten regions.
PulsePoint Respond / AED
911-connected app that, when a public-place cardiac arrest is dispatched, alerts every CPR-trained user within ~500m of the patient and routes them to the nearest registered AED. >4m users; ~1m responders dispatched to 294,000 cardiac-arrest events by Nov 2024. Cities/counties/agencies adopt PulsePoint as a public-health infrastructure.