Get the Gist


  • Don’t Have Time to Read the Book? Here’s a great review of  Better Together: Restoring the American Community Author: Robert D. Putnam and Lewis M. Feldstein (2003) Reviewed by Jay Hubert.

    Social capital is a term used to describe the value of personal relationships in promoting ideas and building community. Emotion-based marketing/messaging is an application of this concept to sell specific products or political positions.  In the book, Better Together: Restoring the American Community by Robert D. Putnam and Lewis M. Feldstein (2003), each chapter describes an organization that has applied this approach.

    The authors of Better Together describe two kinds of social capital, bonding and bridging.  Bonding links people who are similar in crucial respects and tend to be inward looking. Bridging encompasses different types of people and tends to be outward looking.  The authors are more interested in bridging social capital because it is essential to healthy public life and because it is harder to create.

    I will start with quotes that illustrate some of the most significant points in the book.

    Social capital is usually developed in pursuit of a particular goal or set of goals and not for its own sake [p.10].

    One often underestimated technique for creating new identities and bridging social distance, as well as for helping to create social capital in other ways is telling stories. [p.282]

    We found new communications technologies to be most important as support and stimulus for long-standing forms of community, rather than as instigators of radically new “virtual communities” (despite the expectations of some optimist pundits and despite our best efforts to find examples of the latter). [p. 292]

    As you will see from the dates mentioned in the chapter summaries below, this approach to organization building has been around for a long time. Finally, social capital is fancy terminology for developing personal relationships, or more simply, just making friends.

    Summaries of most chapters follow below.

    Valley Interfaith, a coalition of churches located in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas
    This is one of many organizations that are part of Industrial Areas Foundation. IAF builds on principles articulated by Saul Alinsky.  The cookbook is Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice by Edward T. Chambers (2003).  Valley Interfaith is one of the most successful IAF chapters in the country.  This organization has gotten the attention of civic leaders and significantly improved infrastructure and services in a poverty stricken area.

    An IAF chapter was organized in Marin County about four years ago. Marin Organizing Committee recently took its first public position in support of use permits for churches that wanted to offer shelter for the homeless this winter.

    Near North Branch     of the Chicago Library system
    This chapter describes a new branch library in Chicago that provides services to residents of project housing (Cabrini Green) and expensive apartments on Lake Michigan (the Gold Coast).  The branch has become a center for tutoring and community activity.  Both bonding and bridging capital are developed because of the rich and varied interactions among the large body of diverse users.

    The Shipyard Project, Portsmouth, New Hampshire
    Portsmouth is a picturesque tourist attraction. It is fairly prosperous, attracting both retirees and high-tech workers. The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is directly across the river from downtown. However, the shipyard workers and most Portsmouth residents are poles apart in income, politics, and attitudes toward the environment.  The two communities were drawn together by two-year long dance project that was proposed by trustees of the Music Hall organization which presents “live and cinematic arts.” The project was funded by the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Arts Partners Program.  The project was led by a professional dancer who brought together participants from both communities and built respect and engagement between them.  Although the finale performance was attended by an audience of perhaps one thousand, the biggest impact was in building bridges between the participants.

    Tupelo, Mississippi
    In 1940, George McLean, a businessman in Tupelo, encouraged other local businesses to purchase a stud bull and develop dairy farming in the area.  At that time, the region was economically depressed, unemployment was high, and business was declining.  McLean had supported workers in a strike of local textile mills in 1937, so most businessmen in Tupelo thought of him as a communist. McLean is now deceased, but he left a legacy of businessmen who interact strongly with each other and who actively support developing local employment for workers in the community.  A Federal Reserve Bank official in Atlanta said recently, “Tupelo is what we always come back to in economic development circles.” 

    Saddleback Church,     Lake Forest, California.
    This “mega-church” was founded in 1980 using many of the principles developed by the Willow Creek Church Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.  A 1993 Harvard Business Review case study on the Willow Creek church provides more detail than this chapter.  Although the Saddleback Church has 45,000 members, it offers small groups for ever conceivable need and talent: couples groups, singles groups, a group for single parents of teen-age children and one for mothers of preschoolers, woman to woman ministering, men’s morning Bible study, and deaf Bible study, just to name a few.  “Where else can you find a church large enough to have 150 people on your mountain biking e-mail list?”

    Do Something League,     Waupun, Wisconsin
    A group of middle-school students used an action agenda similar to Valley Interfaith to define problems, engage local political leaders, and achieve change.  Do Something League www.dosomething.org was founded in 1993 by the actor, Andrew Shue and an attorney friend, Michael Sanchez.  The organization provides recognition and some financial support to local chapters.  The Waupun middle school students used the IAF principle of grass-root identification of topics for action.  The students raised money for their projects, but not all of them were approved. The students love the following story:

    “There was one project where we wanted to put benches on Main Street but the City, we went to them and did a couple of presentations about that. But they didn’t want it, and they told us we could get garbage cans to put on Main Street and they told us what kind and what color they would be. But then we said no, we don’t want to because they were making all the decisions about what we were going to have.  So it wasn’t us doing the work, they were doing the work and we were just going to pay for it, so we said no.”

    Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers    , Cambridge, Massachusetts
    In 1985, this union separated from the UAW which had tried unsuccessfully for years to organize the mostly female research assistants, lab technicians, secretaries, and other clerical workers at Harvard.  HUCTW leaders used many IAF organizing principles, but rejected Alinsky’s idea of organizing against an “enemy.”  Ultimately the union was successful in gaining recognition.  Part of HUCTW success was recognition that most of their potential members were women.  One of the UAW leaders said, “In the UAW, we’d convene a meeting in a hall and tell people why they ought to join the union. At Harvard, they’d go to someone’s house and have coffee and talk about it. It was the whole social thing.” 

    Experience Corps,     Philadelphia public schools
    This was launched as a pilot program in five cities in 1996.  The parent organization is Civic Ventures, founded by Marc Freedman.  The program pays seniors to work about 15 hours a week tutoring reading and other subjects in public schools.  Reading scores for 75% of the students in the program in Philadelphia have now increased by at least one grade level. An additional benefit is that the tutors bond with each other because they spend a significant amount of time on the school campus and share their experiences and learning with each other.  From my experience in tutoring disadvantaged children, I agree with the authors that the less tangible benefits of pride, hopefulness, and a new sense of possibilities in the future are probably more important than the measureable benefits.

    UPS
    In the 1960’s, UPS workers were primarily white males, many of them Irish Catholic or with a military background.  The chapter discusses the company’s successful changes in response to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In particular, many UPS managers now participate in community internship programs in inner cities. In 2002, UPS ranked 25th among Fortune magazine’s “50 Best Companies for Minorities.”  UPS has created a work environment that involves and respects part-timers and management alike.

    Craigslist, San Francisco Bay Area
    The longevity, growth, and persistent commitment of the founder and its users to a non-commercial electronic community drew the authors’ attention.  Quotes below summarize the major points:

    “However much craigslist may be a community in itself, it unquestionably  functions as a tool to create community by bringing people together, by helping runners, soccer players, readers, theater lovers, wine enthusiasts, Asian Americans, rock climbers, sports fans, and European expatriates find one another. Many hundreds of groups, clubs, and teams have been formed or populated through craigslist.

    [Craig] Newmark [founder of craigslist] says that the WELL, an early online community, was one of the inspirations for craigslist. Created in 1985, the WELL was exhibit A in Howard Rhinegold’s argument in The Virtual Community that electronic meeting places can be genuine communities. …Once considered the outstanding example of an online community, the WELL has seen its presence and reputation fade. The founders of the WELL identified free access as a goal but admitted that they could not survive without charging a fee.  …The idea of paying to meet people is unsettling.”

    Portland, Oregon
    In the mid 1970’s civic activism in Portland as measured by attendance at public meetings and membership in good-government associations was indistinguishable from that in cities of comparable size.  In 1974 Portland established a new Office of Neighborhood Associations.  In the ensuing years, this led the city to recognize about ninety neighborhood associations, each encompassing four thousand to five thousand citizens.  Part of the impetus for this change was protests that led to establishment of the Tom McCall Waterfront Park as opposed to widening the then existing Harbor Drive.

    “David Bragdon former head of the TriMet Council and beginning in 2003, Metro Council president, believes that Portland’s civic activism grew out of the ashes of failed liberal campaigns from the 1960’s. Portlanders who supported Wayne Morse’s Senate campaign, Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid, and the Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign, cut short by Kennedy’s assassination, essentially said, Bragdon argues ‘The hell with national politics, we can make a difference locally.’ Partly as a result, he says, you find in Portland ‘a remarkable number of people who think it’s possible to do things.’”

    In the course of 20 years, the level of civic engagement in Portland has grown to at least triple that in comparable cities.  Over that time period, engagement increased in Portland but decreased in comparable cities.  Much of the success is because of bridging capital, but numerous small, active civic organizations     have also built bonding capital.

    home