Barn Raising Party, photo credit, realbruts! via Flickr
My first memory of the concept of social capital is from the book Bowling Alone, which I read for a wonderful Honors Sociology class my sophomore year of college. I still remember the paper I wrote about the difficulty of defining “we” in post-modern America…lucky for you, I can’t find the hard copy anymore!
Social capital has a variety of connotations, and has been applied in contexts ranging from the job-searching networks of individuals in communities with high unemployment to gem trading within communities of Hassidic Jews to neighborhood watch initiatives in the suburbs.
The essence of social capital is that relationships, and the networks that they form, have value, hence the “capital” part of the term. There’s always some push back from those who resist the quantifying of something as nebulous and mysterious and wonderful as the trust and reciprocity that develop in a well-functioning community, but understanding the role that social capital can play, not just in the health of an overall community but for individuals’ lives, is an important part of community building.
The strengths perspective tells us that we must start with a recognition of the capacities and resources within even the most struggling community, and social capital can be a good lens for doing that. In even many communities under siege, there are webs of relationships that bind people almost invisibly, and these can sometimes be leveraged for real impact.
And, after all, we know that community organizing has to start from an understanding of people’s “enlightened self-interest”, a sort of “what’s in it for me if I help make this community better” process that ensures that people will be dedicated to the community organizing effort and able to articulate to others the vision that animates the work.
But this post isn’t as much about community organizing as much as it’s about the power of social capital at work, an illustration of how very real, tangible, and quantifiable those relationships, and the networks they weave, can be.
This spring, my husband built a shed in our backyard. He could only take a few days off work, and he got my Dad to help him. My father is extraordinarily generous, and pretty much any house project that’s planned around here starts with a calculation of when he’s available.
But here’s where the social capital piece comes in.
My Dad didn’t just show up to help build the shed. He brought some community with him–a guy he met on a volunteer project who’s a retired contractor, someone he went to Greensburg, Kansas with to rebuild tornado-devastated buildings, a guy he knows from church who has a concrete saw-type-thing (that’s as much as I know about it!)…his “team”, so to speak.
None of these guys are my Dad’s best friends. None are related to us. None even live very close to him.
But they’re bound tightly enough to him to spend a day or two of their time helping his son-in-law build a shed in his backyard, because he has built up social capital with them through the course of their relationship.
We started to talk about this over lunch one day, and I made the statement that, if my Dad needed help moving, he’d have 60 people showing up with pickup trucks. Everyone laughed, but it’s true.
So how has he banked so much social capital? In some cases, he’s helped other people directly with their own needs, hence the whole reciprocity thing. In other cases, they’ve just observed him being generous and kind, which builds trust and mutual warmth. In other cases, they may be making a sort of ‘deposit’ of their own, counting on the fact that my Dad will be quick to support them when they need it.
It was my friend and neighbor, Megan (we’ve got quite a bit of social capital here, too; my oldest son spent the day at the neighbor’s so we could paint the shed!) who called our week “a shed-raising”, which I thought was so appropriate.
It’s social capital, after all, that raises barns in rural communities across the U.S. In today’s language, it’s social capital on which people rely to “network” for jobs or trust someone’s recommendations on Yelp.
Where do you see social capital at work in your life? In your community?
