RANCHO CORDOVA, CA (MPG) - With 12 neighborhood parties across the city, National Night Out 2018 proved to be another success for community groups and police who team up each year to hold the event.

The Grapevine stopped in at one large party last week--hosting dozens of neighbors in the Lincoln Village neighborhood--organized by the It Takes a Lincoln Village group.

One ITLV organizer, Sheri Rush, said she’s been holding block parties on National Night Out for at least 20 years in the places she’s lived.

“When we first joined (ITLV), National Night Out was suggested as one of our first projects,” she said.

National Night Out is a campaign that started in the 1970s, but took its current form in 1984 with block parties becoming a major way to bring neighbors together, often driven by neighborhood watch groups and police. In this way, National Night Out promotes community and public safety at the same time.

ITLV organizer Michael Dack said the sense of community in Lincoln Village is one of the most attractive parts of living in the neighborhood.

“I was excited when I moved here that there was a group trying to make it a better place,” he said.

Rush and Dack hosted a party Tuesday evening with a snow cone truck and balloon animals at Lincoln Village Community Park near the pool area.

Rancho Cordova Police representatives and other city employees showed up to check in and fill out a scavenger hunt list that involved interviewing Dack on Facebook Live.

ITLV organizer, Fayzah Mughal, said ITLV hosted National Night Out as one of a string of events in recent years, adding tree plantings, a Christmas Parade and a Halloween event called Trunk or Treat.

The tree planting was a partnership with Sacramento area arborist groups and the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District that saw the first 100 trees planted in May 2016, Mughal said.

ITLV now meets twice each month to discuss community events, meet with guests like city officials and police representatives, and have fun, much like they were on National Night Out.

Dack said the ITLV’s master plan is to get people to interact with their neighbors, something he admits a lot of people don’t do in the area.

Rush said she wants Lincoln Village to be a place more like the one she grew up in, where having tall fences and keeping to yourself would have been weird.

“We’re trying to disrupt the system of not knowing or interacting with your neighbors,” she said.