Strong Neighborhoods: Building Social Capital

Most nonprofits seek to address specific problems—or even particular aspects of specific problems—at the level of the individual. Unfortunately, many of these initiatives ignore the underlying drivers responsible for the problems. Or perhaps they recognize the drivers but see deeper social repair as beyond their scope of responsibilities.

A handful of organizations seek to reform underlying social dynamics by addressing the web of relationships neighborhood by neighborhood. Efforts to improve safety, education, health, and work prospects depend on improving the social system—and this system can differ neighborhood by neighborhood.

In this blog series, we’ll look at how place-based organizations can engage fruitfully in restoring and building social capital. They begin with the assumption that individual well-being and social outcomes depend on a foundation of healthy, place-based relationships, and they seek to build up social capital step by step as a prerequisite for efforts to improve housing, education, and health. They translate ideas about how systems work into practical action, block by block.

Defining Social Capital

First, what do we mean by social capital?

As a term, “social capital” is not as well established as its cousins—financial capital and human capital—and the definitions commentators use are inconsistent and often vague. Although it is often considered a way to help people when they are in need—in Raj Chetty’s words, “where someone else might help you out if you’re not doing well”—social capital is much more than a safety net. At the individual level, relationships, trust, and shared expectations make everything, from finding a job to getting married to staying healthy to conducting business, easier. At the civic level, political scientists Bo Rothstein and Dietlind Stolle, writing in Comparative Politics, conclude that social capital produces “well-performing democratic institutions, personal happiness, optimism and tolerance, economic growth, and democratic stability.”

Social capital may be best thought of as inherent in relationships themselves—as Carrie Leana described in her article on its role in school reform in Stanford Social Innovation Review. It must be built by more than one person and is most valuable when it is a product of permanent associations or a set of overlapping, linked, and mutually reinforcing social ties. This explains why social institutions—such as families, churches, bowling leagues, schools, and unions—and neighborhoods matter so much to social capital’s creation, maintenance, and impact.

It’s worth noting that friendships and informal social networks also produce social capital, but their more informal and less institutionalized nature lowers their capacity and influence. Robert Sampson asserts that weak but structured social ties may be of greater value to social capital than strong, unstructured relationships, at least when considering large groups of people (any individual can be an exception).

Social Capital: Connection and Capacity

Community Renewal International (CRI) sees the connections between people as each neighborhood’s most critical asset. By identifying, empowering, and connecting a network of local leaders across a neighborhood, and connecting them with leaders elsewhere, they build new models of behavior, new connections to opportunity, and capacities for collective action that previously did not exist. The result is a stronger social foundation that is valuable in itself and essential for addressing other social problems.

How does CRI do this? Today, the organization uses a three-tier structure to refashion relationships at the micro, meso, and macro levels across streets, neighborhoods, and whole cities, based on what it calls Haven Houses (which work at the street level), Friendship Houses (which work at the neighborhood level), and a Renewal Team (which include thousands of volunteers and work throughout a city). Each of the levels, which complement and reinforce each other, create mediating institutions and places specifically designed to nurture healthy relationships. CRI also supplements existing mediating institutions in society—some formal, like families, churches, and schools, others informal, like neighborhoods, informal associations, and the media.

CRI’s decentralized structure ensures that the focal points are very local—usually centered on a few dozen households—and that initiative comes from the bottom up, giving people a sense of responsibility and ownership. The goal is to ensure that enough people in any neighborhood act intentionally to treat others more positively and cooperatively, improving and, where necessary, reversing the ratio of caring to uncaring behavior.

While all neighborhoods have Haven Houses and Renewal Team members, the complete system—consisting of two Friendship Houses, at least a dozen Haven House leaders, and more than 50 “We Care” households—is saved for the 30-block neighborhoods that have the greatest need. The Friendship Houses become anchors in neighborhoods that previously had none (better-off areas have such anchors, even if relatively inactive). There are now ten Friendship Houses in five different neighborhoods across greater Shreveport (including Bossier City), an area with more than 300,000 people. These five neighborhoods have seen major drops in crime, gang membership, and drug use and marked improvements in educational trajectories, housing quality, job opportunities, property prices, and satisfaction.

CRI’s founder Mack McCarter says, “Relationships wither if they are not nourished” in this holistic fashion. Lee Jeter, who runs a housing nonprofit in one of CRI’s neighborhoods, describes what happens when they are nourished:

No matter what’s going on with [the broader city’s decisions], the people say, ‘This is our community, and we’re going to take charge.’ To me this is the model for every community in the United States. If you can take a community that was in decline and decay like Allendale [where CRI started], and if you can revitalize that community from the inside, then if it can happen in Allendale, it can happen in any community in the United States.

Adapting or Replicating a Model

Lead For America, a rapidly growing nonprofit based in Dodge City, Kansas, is incorporating CRI’s model into its programming. The organization selects, trains, and places two-year fellows in public-serving institutions in towns and counties across the country. Lead For America looks for youth who “prioritize humility, service, and collective impact over self-advancement” and encourages them to stay on after their fellowships and “build place-based initiatives, start entrepreneurial social ventures, and act as community hubs to broaden and deepen local connection.”

CRI’s model shows how overlapping institutions that are embedded in a specific locale can foster social capital that catalyzes even greater trust and meets relational and practical needs. CRI’s model is intensely local but it is also replicable. In the next blog post, we’ll see how BakerRipley builds social capital using community centers and appreciative inquiry.