This billion-dollar startup helps neighbors and local businesses stay connected and help each other during the COVID-19 lockdown

Nextdoor allows neighbors to help each other through social distancing.Fertnig/Getty Images

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing requirements can make neighbors feel distant despite their living nearby.
• The networking service Nextdoor, founded in 2011, offers a place to stay connected with your neighbors, whether to ask for recommendations for a plumber for to offer shopping assistance to an elderly resident.
• The platform's cofounder Prakash Janakiraman says that users have skyrocketed during the pandemic, "Usage is up 80% in most neighborhoods."
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In times of crises, our network is our first port of call: our family, our friends, our colleagues.

Increasingly, as a society, knocking on our neighbor's door has become a last resort.

In Bowling Alone — written in 1995 but what may prove to be seminal theory in the post COVID-19 world — the political scientist Robert Putnam describes how the chaos of modern life: longer working hours, staring into screens, and driving everywhere has made us residents of, rather than active participants in, our communities.

He talks about the damaging decline of "social capital" — deeply rooted civic relationships, rather than pages full of so-called friends we only interact with online — in modern American life.