Restoring Americans’ Civic Spirit

‘Bowling Alone’ author sees key role for charities in renewing social ties

Robert Putnam is trying to bring about a grand-scale nonprofit revival in America.

The Harvard University professor says charities, associations, and foundations must seriously rethink their operations to focus on increasing the social ties that link people to one another — what Mr. Putnam calls “building social capital” — or risk failure and obsolescence.

In his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Mr. Putnam pulls together polling data, surveys, and new research on charity membership trends as part of a comprehensive effort to make the case that Americans today don’t possess the social bonds, formal and informal, that are essential to solving major problems.

“Fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live,” Mr. Putnam says. “Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.”

Mr. Putnam’s crusade is winning some high-profile converts.

The Ford Foundation and three dozen community foundations have provided $1-million to help Mr. Putnam conduct what is being billed as one of the most extensive surveys ever of citizen engagement and participation.

Mr. Putnam is also working aggressively to get the social-capital issue high on the agenda of the next president. He plans to bring together prominent charity leaders early next year to make policy recommendations to the new administration, and he has been meeting with representatives of the Republican and Democratic campaigns in an attempt to get the candidates talking about social capital on the campaign trail.

Too Much Television

Though Mr. Putnam believes the social-capital issue should command the attention of the nation’s political and nonprofit leaders, he does not believe they are the major culprits behind the erosion in social ties. Among the forces he says have been more influential: “Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values.”

The consequences of the loss in social capital have already been felt by many groups, Mr. Putnam says.

Despite studies that have shown steady gains in the total amount Americans give to charity and the hours they spend volunteering, Mr. Putnam says that people are not nearly as generous today as in years past when measured against the increases in their wealth. And gains in volunteering have come largely from people over the age of 50 — which may be a sign that younger generations aren’t nearly as interested in helping charities.

“After years of high and rising generosity for many good causes,” he says, “over the last four decades Americans have become steadily more tight-fisted, precisely when we have also disengaged from the social life of our communities.”

Mr. Putnam’s analysis and conclusions, particularly his dire view of the current condition of American society, have been hotly contested.

Brian O’Connell, a professor at Tufts University who formerly directed Independent Sector, a coalition of major charities and grant makers, says Mr. Putnam overstates the decline in civic participation.

“No one wants to say everything’s fine,” says Mr. O’Connell, author of Civil Society: The Underpinnings of American Democracy. “But that’s quite different than saying everything is going to hell in a hand basket.”

Even as debate continues over whether social connections have declined or by how much, a growing number of philanthropic leaders are looking into ways they can help Americans strengthen their social ties.

At the center of those efforts is Mr. Putnam, who is involved in several projects he hopes will spur “a lively period of social-capital creation.”

Next month a committee he chairs is scheduled to issue recommendations for ways to overcome barriers to civic participation. The group, based at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has spent the past three years developing ideas for ways to better connect Americans with one another.

The 33 committee members include E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist; Stephen Goldsmith, the former Republican mayor of Indianapolis and now top domestic adviser to presidential candidate George W. Bush; and Liz Lerman, founder of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Md.

The committee’s report is expected to analyze the ways that social capital relates to different aspects of life, such as work, politics, the arts, religion, and education and youth activities.

In January, Mr. Putnam hopes to release the results of a survey of 30,000 people interviewed for a half hour each about their civic involvement.

Community foundations in 25 cities have agreed to help with the survey’s financing and logistics, in part because they want to know more about social ties in their own cities and states and then develop ways to strengthen weak connections.

Mr. Putnam expects to repeat the survey in four or five years to see if the community foundations and others have been able to “move the needle,” as he puts it, and measurably increase social capital. He will use his Web site (http://www.bettertogether.org) to promote the survey and to give people in different parts of the country a way to communicate about projects that have been successful in building social capital.

Mr. Putnam also expects to bring together early next year about 40 charities from what he informally describes as “the old guard and the vanguard” to share ideas and recommend to the new president some steps government can take to increase social ties.

About half of the invited groups will be organizations like the American Red Cross, Goodwill Industries, the League of Women Voters, and the Lions Club — charities that were part of a wave of nonprofit creation that took place a century ago. Many of these organizations have experienced recent declines in membership that Mr. Putnam attributes in part to the overall breakdown of social ties.

The other half will be groups started in the past few decades. Many of those organizations, such as the community-service group Do Something, were created specifically to encourage young people to volunteer.

“Our challenge is now to reinvent the 21st-century equivalent of the Boy Scouts or the settlement house or the playground or Hadassah or the United Mine Workers or the N.A.A.C.P.,” he says. The country needs “a renewed set of institutions and channels for a reinvigorated civic life that will fit the way we have come to live.”

Membership Declines

In his book, Mr. Putnam tries to help many of the “old guard” groups understand problems of declining or aging memberships in the context of national trends rather than looking only to their own isolated set of circumstances.

He notes that the average membership rates for 32 national organizations with local chapters have followed a steady pattern of decline since 1969 when measured as a percentage of the total population each group tries to reach. For example, the membership rate for 4-H, which was calculated as a percentage of rural youths, declined 26 percent from its peak in 1950 to 1997.

Opinion polls taken by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research from 1973 to 1994 also show that “the number of men and women who took any leadership role in any local organization — from ‘old fashioned’ fraternal organizations to new age encounter groups — dropped more than 50 percent.”

Mr. Putnam says that while the number of nonprofit associations has grown in recent years, many of those groups have few or no members, hold few meetings, and have no local offices. Instead, donors simply write checks to a national organization and are considered members. “The organizational eruption between the 1960’s and the 1990’s represented a proliferation of letterheads, not a boom of grassroots participation,” he writes.

Mr. Putnam emphasizes that not all social ties lead to good results: Alliances based on religion or ethnicity, for example, can foster bigotry toward others. Still, he says that strong social capital must be built first if foundations and nonprofit groups expect to succeed in bringing about social change.

Speeches to Charities

Mr. Putnam’s research and conclusions are giving nonprofit leaders much to ponder and debate. Several hundred charitable organizations have already asked him to give speeches on his findings about social capital.

Talee Crowe, who helps recruit and retain members for Rotary International, says Mr. Putnam’s work has helped her understand why her organization has started to see slight declines in its North American membership in the last few years.

The group has taken several steps to reverse the trend. Many Rotary clubs have switched from luncheon to breakfast meetings to accommodate busy work schedules, she says. And Rotary leaders are considering other options, such as holding meetings around a cocktail hour after work or over a Saturday golf game, or even holding virtual meetings via the Internet. Clubs are also looking at such changes as switching the frequency of meetings from weekly to bimonthly in an effort to get more people to participate.

A high priority for Rotary and many other groups has been recruiting young people. Many Rotary clubs now challenge members to find someone 10 years their junior and persuade him or her to join.

Rotary has also increased its number of Interact clubs, the high-school counterpart of Rotary, particularly in schools that require students to log volunteer hours to graduate.

Community Foundations

Among the most active players in the effort to get the nonprofit world concerned about social capital are leaders of community foundations.

Lewis M. Feldstein, president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, says community foundations make logical disciples for Mr. Putnam’s work because they are in the business of using social capital — connections with donors — to raise financial capital, which they in turn then convert back to social capital by making grants that benefit services that pull people together.

“While we make grants to build daycare centers and affordable housing, and provide AIDS support groups, and acquire endangered land, at the core of all of it is not the individual projects but strengthening community,” says Mr. Feldstein.

While roughly three dozen community foundations have joined together to promote social capital, figuring out how to translate the idea into practice is proving tough.

Several community foundations are considering starting social-capital grants programs. Most are waiting until they have the results of Mr. Putnam’s survey, but one — the Winston-Salem Foundation, in North Carolina — has already awarded its first two rounds of grants.

Donna Germain Rader, the Winston-Salem Foundation’s vice president for grants and programs, says the point of the grant program is to try to get organizations to concentrate on how they build ties between community members. In the past, she says, such ties have tended to be a byproduct rather than a specific goal. “What’s different is figuring out how to build social capital intentionally,” she says.

Ms. Rader and other community-foundation leaders also are considering asking all future grant applicants to fill out a “social-capital impact statement” to explain how a project would affect local social connections.

Applying such criteria to grant considerations could cause big shifts in which groups end up receiving money.

For example, events like charity meetings, which community foundations now rarely pay for “because they seem so everyday and banal and quotidian,” says Mr. Feldstein, may suddenly merit a grant because “important social capital is being built.”

Inspiring Creativity

Mr. Feldstein says he hopes an emphasis on social capital will inspire charities to be creative in how they provide services. Daycare centers, for example, might use foundation money to experiment with giving parents a financial incentive to spend five or ten minutes at the end of each day getting to know the other parents and thereby creating a network of people who care about issues that affect children, he says.

At the same time, some projects that might have sounded attractive in the past may be viewed less positively because of their potential to weaken social capital. A proposal to professionalize a successful volunteer network of care providers, for example, might relieve pressures on family members and volunteers by adding paid staff members. But it could also weaken the connections people build in helping one another through tough times.

Frequent Mentions

Mr. Feldstein says he holds out hope that the social-capital movement may one day prove to be roughly comparable to other efforts to reshape society, such as the environmental movement.

“Who knew in the early 1970’s after the first Earth Day what ideas would pan out and which would fall flat?” he asks.

Mr. Feldstein says he’s encouraged by the frequency with which he is hearing the term social capital spoken by charity, business, and government leaders.

“If we can create a critical mass of enough people talking about it,” he says, “and if the research keeps being produced that reminds people that social capital can mean more effective education, better health, and so on, then it becomes almost inescapable.”