From potlucks in Mechanicsburg to snowy driveways in Lebanon, it is the quiet acts of service that define who we are.

Sunday Deep Dive | November 23, 2025

The fluorescent lights of the fire hall in Camp Hill hum with that familiar, low-level buzz, competing with the smell of stale coffee and industrial floor wax. It’s 10:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. Most of the town is asleep, or at least scrolling through their phones in bed. But here, six people—a mechanic, a high school teacher, a retired nurse, and three IT professionals—are meticulously rolling hoses and checking oxygen tanks.

They aren’t getting paid. In fact, they paid for their own boots.

There is a specific kind of silence in the 717 right before Thanksgiving. It’s the silence of the fields in Lancaster stripped bare for winter, and the quiet of the Susquehanna moving slow and grey under the Walnut Street Bridge. But if you listen closely, that silence is filled with the invisible machinery of neighbors keeping neighbors afloat.

As we head into the holiday week, it’s worth asking: In an era where we are told constantly how divided we are, why does this region still insist on showing up for each other?

To understand the 717, you have to look at the numbers that don’t show up on a Zillow listing. Pennsylvania relies on volunteer firefighters more than almost any other state in the union. According to the latest state data, over 90% of our fire departments are entirely or mostly volunteer.

Think about that. When a siren wails at 3:00 a.m. in Elizabethtown or Marysville, the people rushing toward the danger aren’t doing it for a pension. They’re doing it because they live here.

"It's not a hobby," says Mark, a battalion chief in York County who asked we only use his first name. "It’s a covenant. You watch my house, I watch yours. That’s the deal we make when we live here, even if we never say it out loud."

But that covenant is being tested. We’ve seen the "Help Wanted" signs outside the fire halls from Carlisle to Columbia. The demands of modern life—the two-job households, the digital distractions—are eroding the time we have to give. Yet, despite the shortages, the trucks still roll. The grit of the volunteer fire service is the perfect metaphor for Central PA: stressed, under-funded, but stubbornly, relentlessly reliable.

We often romanticize the Amish tradition of the barn raising—hundreds of hands lifting a timber frame in a single day. It’s a beautiful image, woven into the tourist branding of Lancaster County. But if you look past the buggies, you’ll see that the "English" (non-Amish) communities have adapted this ethos, not abandoned it.

In 2025, the barn raising just looks different.

It looks like the "Buy Nothing" groups in Harrisburg that exploded in popularity this year, where everything from baby formula to winter coats is exchanged without a single cent changing hands. It looks like the Meal Trains that circulate through neighborhoods in Lititz whenever a family gets a bad diagnosis.

We saw this clearly last month during the brief federal SNAP disruption. While Washington gridlocked, local pantries and improvised neighborhood networks went into overdrive. The Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, which set a "Bold Goal" back in 2015 to close the meal gap by this year, found itself testing that capacity. The result? A surge of private donations and "porch drops"—neighbors leaving bags of non-perishables on the stoops of those they knew were struggling, often anonymously.

There is a "Dutchy" pragmatism to this kindness. It isn’t performative. In the 717, we don’t necessarily bake you a pie to be your best friend; we bake you a pie because you need to eat, and we have extra flour. It’s functional compassion.

There is a sociological concept called "weak ties"—the benefits we get from the people we don't know very well, like the mail carrier or the guy who runs the corner deli.

Central PA excels at weak ties. It’s the wave from the steering wheel on a back road in Perry County. It’s the conversation in the checkout line at the Giant or the Weis. These micro-interactions build a reservoir of trust that we draw from when things get hard.

However, we can’t ignore that "neighboring" is harder than it used to be. New housing developments often lack the front porches that facilitated the evening chats of the past. Our town squares are competing with algorithms that are designed to make us angry at people we’ve never met.

Yet, the culture holds. You see it in the revival of the "Third Place"—the coffee shops in Midtown Harrisburg, the breweries in York, the public libraries that have morphed into community centers. We are instinctively finding ways to be in the same room again.

This Thursday, most of us will sit down to a table loaded with turkey, filling (it’s filling, not stuffing, if you’re doing it right), and corn. We will say grace for the food.

But perhaps we should also say grace for the invisible safety net that hangs underneath our communities. It is woven from the hours volunteered at the fire hall, the extra cans of soup dropped in the donation bin, and the snowblowers that mysteriously clear a widow’s driveway before she wakes up.

We are not perfect neighbors. We argue about zoning, we complain about parking, and we disagree on politics. But when the river rises, or the house catches fire, or the pantry goes bare, the 717 remembers the old rules.

We show up.

If this deep dive made you think about your role in the community, don't let the feeling fade after Sunday coffee. The region needs hands more than it needs opinions.

Volunteer Pennsylvania:

The state maintains a robust portal for finding volunteer opportunities, from disaster response to mentoring.

Visit: serv.pa.gov

What is the "Small Act" that defines your neighborhood?

Reply to this email with your vote or a story about a neighbor who saved your day.