It’s a cold January morning, and behind salt-smeared windows at the Gerrish & Gray café in downtown Windsor, N.S., the founders of the Happy Community Project, who sip absently from cups of coffee, seem anything but cheerful.

“I’m not your friend,” says Barry Braun, a retired business consultant who lives in nearby Ellershouse, explaining how most people simply “forget to be human” when they meet someone they know on the street. “I may smile and say hello, but you’re not coming over to my house for dinner.”

“That’s right,” chimes in Bruce Dienes, a psychology professor at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, N.S., whose chest-length silver beard gives him the appearance of a shopping mall Santa. “We’re tribal animals,” he says, munching on a breakfast sandwich. “It’s just, you know, instinctive.”

On the other hand, the unlikely pair, who have spent the past seven years on a self-appointed, unpaid mission to coax Nova Scotians to bring out the best in themselves and their communities, don’t sound particularly gloomy, either. “The good news is we’re shifting the culture at the grassroots level,” Braun winks.

Dienes concurs between chomps on his sandwich, “We’re creating a critical mass.”

Blame it on strange politics, weird science, or a global pandemic, but since 2017, when Braun began, later joined by Dienes, demand for their socially crusading services has risen. They’ve helped community leaders in Windsor and surrounding towns with things like setting up farmers markets and designing parklands, involving countless volunteers without relying on government money or top-down cultural and recreational agendas. Their expanded “good neighbours” program is starting to roll out in other communities of the province.

Now, thanks to social media, word is spreading. There’s a Happy Community-inspired project in Kolkata, India, where, defying entrenched cultural, social, and economic mores, well-heeled residents now routinely pick up garbage on streets where only homeless people once roamed. Braun tells me that he helped other similar initiatives begin in Boulder, Colorado, and Kabale, Uganda.

Says Braun, “The only way you change the way people think is by giving them new experiences.” That is to say: something better to think about. Adds Dienes: “That’s what creates buzz.”

Certainly, it did for Abraham Zebian, mayor of West Hants Regional Municipality (which includes the former town of Windsor) where the project fielded-tested its approach for the first time in early 2020. “Historically, this community… was three different municipal units that could never traditionally get along,” he says. “It got to a point where things like important infrastructure initiatives, sports complexes, roads, sidewalks, would just die.”

Indeed, Braun notes, “The culture at the time was one of divisiveness.”

The trick was to start by assembling a small team of seven people, who then attracted 50 more, who, in turn, drew another 150. That built enough momentum to create 12 community projects within eight months, one of which was the Avon Community Farmers’ Market in downtown Windsor.

“That was a 100 per cent community project,” Zebian says. “People started to go out to socialize, enjoy music, and meet newcomers ... It has made a huge difference. Beyond providing a venue for social connection, it also became a gateway for Ukrainian newcomers to integrate into the community.”

Other projects ranged from outdoor movie theatres to community parks. In Ellershouse, residents turned an overgrown lot into a vibrant green space with paths, gardens, and a gazebo, all without government funding. “The 450 residents volunteered their expertise, equipment, and money to create a $30,000 project,” Braun recalls. “It was entirely community-led.”

The real achievement, however, lay not in the projects but in the cultural shift they precipitated. “This wasn’t just another thing happening. It was something different,” Braun says. “Over time, it attracted 700 volunteers, and the message shifted from ‘We’re divisive’ to ‘In this community we do stuff together.’”

Zebian recounts a transformative moment during one such event, the Corn Boil Challenge. “There was a man who had been extremely negative about everything related to community events,” he says. “I was shocked to see him there. By the end of the day, he had completely shifted his perspective. To this day, he’s a firm believer in community.”

All of which is sweet music to Braun’s ears. Originally from Saskatchewan, he arrived as a teenager in Nova Scotia in 1976 and eventually built a career coaching executives and entrepreneurs. He’s always felt at home here. “My motivation for doing this is my grandchildren,” he says. “I want to leave them a legacy not of money but of security, support, and happiness in this place.”

It’s also personal for Dienes who, born in England, emigrated to Canada in 1966 and settled in Nova Scotia in 1981. “I lived a couple of years in Cape Breton, and it was probably one of the friendliest places I’d ever been,” he says. “But when the work situation shifted, my partner and I realized that while there were a lot of friendly people, we would never, ever belong.”

Projects designed to bring a community closer together are one thing, he says, but how do you help somebody who is truly out get in? Braun puts it bluntly: “I can give you an example of someone whose wife had died six months earlier and nobody in the neighbourhood noticed until a moving van showed up one day ... Instead of saying, ‘Let’s get all the people interested in a farmers market together,’ we’re saying, ‘Let’s get the people who live in a neighbourhood to really get to know and care about each other.’ That’s the next stage.”

Enter the Good Neighbour Method, introduced in 2023 to effectively scale the Happy Community Project both more broadly and personally. The initiative is now training local neighbourhood connectors to organize small events such as potlucks, movie nights, or outdoor activities, and bring neighbours together in safe, inclusive spaces.

“We’re giving them the opportunity to belong in their own neighbourhoods,” Dienes explains. “We’re fostering trust and collaboration.”

Says Braun: “Lunenburg and Yarmouth both want us to implement the method there. There’s a landlord in Truro who wants us to bring it to his 350 tenants. There’s an organization in Montreal. We also have inquiries from Grand Prairie, Alberta, and Kitchener, Ontario ... There’s an appetite for this.”

And not just here. Last year, the U.S. Surgeon General described a new “loneliness epidemic” every bit as perilous to health as smoking or obesity. In January 2025, Time magazine reported that the decline in so-called “third spaces” which are informal gathering places outside of home and work, is leaving people that much harder, meaner.

Then again, 22-year-old Md Zaman Khan was so impressed with Braun’s and Dienes’s work that he decided to replicate it to clean up the streets of his hometown Kolkata, India. “Inspired by the social injustice he saw, Zaman took to the internet to express his thoughts on the state of humanity,” according to the article on the Happy Community Project’s website. “He wrote an email explaining the need for a Happy Community Project.” Since then, the group has amassed 75 Facebook members.

In other words, buzz.

“We humans tend to have in groups and out groups, and this is in our DNA,” says Dienes, as he drinks a second cup of coffee to fortify his analysis. “It’s how we protected ourselves millions of years ago. It’s not rational. It’s automatic. People know they want to belong but don’t necessarily know how. But you build connections by connecting.”

Braun acknowledges that “most people are afraid of the future. They know today isn’t good and want to feel safer. And shifting culture is a big deal.” Still, he insists, “once you’ve done it, it’s hard to shift back” and, suddenly, you’re inviting that person you met on the street over for dinner.

Someone like, say, Zebian, who says the project’s impact on Windsor alone is proof of concept. “It was the catalyst of happiness,” he says. “It began before COVID, but helped us navigate through it. It changed how we see ourselves and each other.”

Braun adds, “This isn’t about one community or one project. It’s about creating a movement. If we can do that, we’ll leave a legacy worth inheriting ... How do we get people to remember how to be human?”