A Snapshot of Civic Ties

Regional survey links religion with strong sense of community

Religious ties play a big role in getting Americans to participate in a wide

range of social activities, including giving, volunteering, and other efforts that build strong communities, according to results of a new survey.

In a wide-ranging poll of 30,000 people, religious belief and participation emerged as the key indicator of civic involvement. In addition to giving and volunteering for charitable causes at higher-than-average rates, people with religious ties scored higher in measures of trust of others and were likely to have a wider, more diverse circle of friends than people without religious beliefs and connections.

“Americans in faith-based communities are actually pretty good citizens,” says Robert Putnam, a Harvard University professor and the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, who led the effort. “They give more, they volunteer more, they vote, they donate blood.”

While “religious engagement is associated with lots of good things,” Mr. Putnam says, he cautions that people with strong religious views and connections also tended to rate lower than average in tolerance for people with ideas different from their own. For example, they were more likely to favor banning unpopular books from libraries and were less supportive of immigrants and homosexuals.

In a separate, national sample, 88 percent of Americans reported some religious affiliation, and 84 percent said religion was somewhat or very important to them. About 58 percent said they were members of specific churches, synagogues, or other religious organizations, while 45 percent said they attended religious activities at least once a week.

Grants from the Ford Foundation and about three dozen community foundations paid for the survey, which consisted of half-hour interviews with people in 40 different geographic areas, including a mix of cities, regions, and states. The questions dealt with everything from how often people donated and volunteered, to whether they held religious beliefs and attended services, to how many friends they have and the diversity of those relationships.

The survey findings are sure to get close attention at a time when President Bush and others seek ways to expand the role religious groups play in solving social problems.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers on charity issues, Stephen Goldsmith and John J. DiIulio Jr., both served on a committee organized by Mr. Putnam known as the Saguaro Seminar. The committee put together a report in December that recommends ways government, businesses, and nonprofit groups could improve social connections (The Chronicle, January 11).

Grant makers seeking to fight social ills are also likely to find that the survey results will influence their efforts. The premise behind the survey was to determine whether cities and towns whose residents have lots of different ties to one another work better than communities of people who are socially isolated. Mr. Putnam has spent much of the past year urging charities and grant makers to play a lead role in renewing the social ties that link Americans to one another (The Chronicle, October 5).

Among the survey’s findings:

• The strength of residents’ social ties to their communities predicted the quality of community life and residents’ happiness far better than other measures, such as education or income levels. In the five geographic areas where residents reported high trust in their neighbors, local government, and civic institutions, about half, or 52 percent, rated their towns as top places to live. By contrast, in the five regions with the lowest levels of social trust, only 31 percent of respondents gave their hometowns high marks.
• Southern and Midwestern localities generally measured high in giving and volunteering. Atlanta; Baton Rouge, La.; and St. Paul all rated above average, as did parts of Michigan and North Carolina. But many California localities ranked at the low end of the scale, including San Diego, San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley.
• Metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse populations, such as Boston and Los Angeles, rated high in measures of tolerance, based on answers to questions on interracial dating and friendships. But people living in those areas tended to score low on other measures of social connections, such as friendships and participation in clubs, and on giving and volunteering. Residents of such areas were nearly twice as likely to say there was no one or at most one other person with whom they could share confidences, compared with people in the most homogeneous communities who had, on average, five to seven people in whom they could confide.
• In diverse areas, giving, volunteering, and membership in nonprofit groups was largely limited to the better-off and better-educated people in the area. But in very homogeneous communities, people of all economic and education levels participated in nonprofit activities. “In L.A., only the upper-middle class goes to P.T.A. meetings. But in New Hampshire, auto mechanics are just as likely to go,” Mr. Putnam says. “Quite apart from increasing the level of civic engagement, we need to attend to its social distribution,” he says.

“America is obviously becoming a more diverse society, and that has great advantages,” Mr. Putnam says. “The bad news is that, in the short run, the effect is to make it harder to build community.”

In addition to the 40 areas included in the study — which were determined by the grant makers who paid for it — a national poll of about 3,000 people was done to provide comparison. But the study did not include detailed looks at some major cities, including Miami, New York, and Salt Lake City, which is known for its strong religious and charity ties.

Instilling Local Pride

The survey provides some interesting and important clues, and vast amounts of data, that nonprofit leaders can draw from. Many community foundations are just beginning to evaluate the survey data. They are now planning meetings with donors, area charities, and local government officials to explain and discuss the results and to figure out ways to use the information to strengthen weak social ties.

Some community leaders will use the information to help instill local pride, as well as spur improvements through competition.

Charity officials in Baton Rouge, which scored high in measures of religious participation, civic leadership, and giving and volunteering, plan to emphasize the area’s strengths through its “We Are B.R.” campaign. The campaign, already under way, was organized by a group known as Forum 35, which encourages philanthropy among young leaders. One goal is to use the campaign as a way to get local charities to start working together more. The campaign also hopes to encourage local residents to get more involved in community activities and organizations.

The campaign is getting its message across using billboards, banners, posters, and bumper stickers with slogans such as “399,000 crawfish eaters can’t be wrong.”

Many of the promotions paired well-known local celebrities with volunteers or nonprofit and government employees doing similar work to help draw attention to the contributions of unsung heroes. For example, one advertisement pairs the Louisiana State University baseball coach with the coach of a local Little League. Another pairs a famous local chef with a school cafeteria worker. A third highlights a well-known blues musician with a member of the Baton Rouge symphony.

Jeff Fluhr, who leads the social-capital panel for Forum 35, says the survey helped identify areas for improvement for the city. It received low marks in interracial trust and in “protest politics” — a measure of how willing people are to sign petitions, participate in rallies, or otherwise oppose controversial policies.

Mr. Fluhr says he believes one key to improving race relations in the city will be to increase the number of mentor and reading programs in inner-city schools. “There’s a lot of interaction among races in schools, and reaching out is a big component of creating trust in our community,” he says.

Many of the community foundations that participated in the survey say they plan to ask themselves — as well as those applying to them for money — how grants and other efforts by the foundations might strengthen or weaken social bonds. That may entail increasing support for projects that might previously have seemed fairly mundane, such as paying for meetings or community centers that have the potential to attract a diverse crowd.

Seeing Neighbors

But some grant makers have started to explore new efforts. Leaders at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, for example, have become vocal advocates for something not often thought of as a philanthropic cause: locally owned grocery and general stores.

Lewis M. Feldstein, the foundation’s president, says “These stores are important because it’s where you come at the end of the day and see your neighbors,” particularly in rural areas. But Mr. Feldstein says many such stores are in danger of closing.

In its grant making, the foundation is asking all applicants to include a “social-capital impact statement” as a way to encourage people to think about ways to form new social ties and strengthen existing ones.

A particular challenge for the foundation, and for the state, is finding ways to increase giving and volunteering. Mr. Feldstein says New Hampshire ranks low in “two of the major drivers of civic engagement — religious activity and how long you’ve lived in a community.” Mr. Feldstein says a high percentage of the state’s residents have moved there within the past two years. “We’ve got to work even more aggressively to build systems that engage people when they get here,” he says.

One of the biggest changes that could grow out of the survey findings is an increased willingness by grant makers to work with religious or faith-based groups.

Donna Germain Rader, vice president for grants and programs at the Winston-Salem Foundation, in North Carolina, says the foundation will look for ways to help to build on the experiences of a white church and a black church that teamed up a couple of years ago to build a house through a Habitat for Humanity project.

Ms. Rader says that when the foundation made a grant to support the project, it did so as a way to help provide new housing rather than as a way to strengthen community connections. But the one-time event ended up leading to others, with the two choirs singing together, the two youth groups going on joint outings, and members of the two congregations meeting occasionally for dinners.

The churches “taught us something about how we need to be intentional in giving,” says Ms. Rader. In making similar grants in the future, the foundation says it will consider ways it might encourage involvement over an extended period of time.

The Grand Rapids Community Foundation, in Michigan, has recently made a number of grants to such groups because of their effectiveness in bringing people from diverse backgrounds together to solve local problems. One such grant, $45,000 to Heartside Ministries, will pay for a computer center for people of different economic and racial backgrounds.

A Daunting Task

The ultimate goal, say many charity leaders, will be to figure out how best to increase social interactions within a geographic area.

Mr. Putnam expects to repeat the survey in four or five years to see if the community foundations and others have been able to make a difference, and measurably increase social capital in the areas.

Even now, nonprofit leaders are beginning to realize just how daunting a task that may prove to be.

The California Community Foundation, for example, is struggling with how to raise the low levels of trust among residents, particularly recent immigrants who have come from countries experiencing civic unrest where government corruption is high.

“L.A. looks pretty awful in terms of trust in institutions ranging from the police department to your own neighbors,” says Allan Parachini of Belin Consulting, which is advising the California Community Foundation, where Mr. Parachini served as vice president for communications.

“There’s no way a grant maker could devise a strategy in one giving cycle that could have any effect on something this broad,” he says. But he hopes local leaders will use the survey data to get inspired to search for solutions. “There’s not enough effort now to get at what divides us and what unites us,” says Mr. Parachini. “We need to set up, not just little meetings in community halls, but creative ways to bring together people who would otherwise never meet.”

For his part, Mr. Putnam plans to continue to travel the country and talk about the survey’s findings.

“This is just the opening gun in a multiyear project to revive community life,” says Mr. Putnam.

The big lesson from the survey, some observers say, may be that America’s social ties are in better shape than Mr. Putnam predicted in Bowling Alone. Even areas that scored low on several of the measures of social connection showed some great strengths. More than three-quarters of respondents identified themselves with either or both of two key benchmarks of civic engagement — involvement in religion and tolerance for those of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.

Says Mr. Parachini, “Things may not be as bad as people thought.”

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For copies of the survey results, contact: Saguaro Seminar, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138, (617) 495-8809. They may also be obtained on the Internet at http://www.cfsv.org/communitysurvey.