Principles for Building Social Capital

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Throughout this report, we offer principles of social capital building to guide institutional leaders. Some of these principles are specially tailored to specific types of institutions, and they are discussed in the next five chapters. Here we suggest four principles that are broadly applicable across categories of organizations: the Social Capital Impact Principle; the Recycling Principle; the Bridging Principle; and the C2C Principle.

The Social Capital Impact Principle. The frame of “social capital” helps us to see the world afresh. Social capital is not only a resource, but it is also a lens for evaluating institutions, programs, and individual behavior. Looking through a social capital lens, for example, we see front porches not as an architectural frill, but as an effective strategy for building strong, safe, friendly neighborhoods. Consistent use of the social capital lens can both prevent civically harmful decisions and guide us toward civically beneficial choices.
Much in the way America is developing “diversity” as a lens for judging the performance of employers in recruiting and retaining workers, and “environmental impact” is factored in judging the wisdom of economic development projects, we will become a better place when the “social capital impact” becomes a standard part of institutional and individual decision-making.

The Recycling Principle. Unlike financial capital, social capital has an interesting and valuable property: It is not expended when it is drawn upon. Instead, drawing upon our stocks of social capital usually generates even more. Therefore, as individuals and institutional decision-makers, we must imagine innovative ways to “recycle” existing stocks of social capital to create new stocks of different forms. For example, the political movement for women’s suffrage emerged, in part, from non-political literary circles.

The Bridging Principle. Social capital may be categorized in many ways. One important way is the degree to which the connections reinforce similarities among individuals, or span differences. Alliances between people who are more alike than they are different are called “bonding” social capital. Connections between people who are different along some important dimension – such as race, socioeconomic status, or gender – are referred to as “bridging” social capital. Although both bonding and bridging networks are valuable, we believe that Americans should put a special emphasis on creating “bridging” social capital. Research shows that building connections across groups is especially valuable for everything from getting a job to securing important social and political rights. For example, a recent study concluded that decent wages and working conditions for immigrant farmworkers were secured only after organizers brought together an ethnically, religiously, and socio-economically diverse group of people to work on the issue.
Creating bridging social capital will become even more critical as the nation grows more crowded and diverse and seeks to maintain social harmony and prosperity.

The “C2C” Principle. The cultural disempowerment of citizens is a cause of the decline in individual willingness to assume leadership roles in civic life. In the emerging language of the “dot com” world, C2C refers to communications that occur “consumer to consumer.” We expand that definition to mean “citizen to citizen” and “community to community.” Vertical communication between “experts” and “laymen” has come to characterize too much of our interactions and has legitimized the illegitimate notion that regular folks don’t have much to offer one another. Efforts to build social capital must strengthen horizontal communication and reciprocity among peers. Self-help groups are founded on this principle and have used it successfully to fight alcoholism and help people cope with traumatic events in their lives.