The number of socially isolated Americans have more than doubled over the 2 decades from 1984-2004 from 10% to a quarter of all Americans.
Civic engagement and volunteering is the new hybrid health club for the 21st century that's free to join and miraculously improves both your health and the community's through the work performed and the social ties built.
THE SAGUARO SEMINAR: CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN AMERICA
is an ongoing
initiative of Professor
Robert D. Putnam at the John
F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University. The project focuses on expanding what we know about
our levels of trust and community engagement and on developing strategies
and efforts to increase this engagement. A signature effort was the
multi-year dialogue (1995-2000) on how we can increasingly build bonds of civic
trust among Americans and their communities.
THE MISSION OF THE SAGUARO SEMINAR
From 1995-2000, the Saguaro Seminar strove to develop a handful of far-reaching,
actionable ideas to significantly increase Americans' connectedness
to one another and
to community instruction.
Since 2000, the Seminar's mission is both to improve social capital measurement and the availability of social capital data and to undertake analysis of building social capital in a changing environment -- in increasingly diverse communities, with changing faith communities, in workplaces, and amidst greater social and civic inequality.
The central premise of social capital is that social networks have value. Social capital refers to the collective value of all "social networks" (who people know) and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other ("norms of reciprocity").
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AMERICAN GRACE WINS BEST POLITICAL SCIENCE BOOK OF 2010-2011.
Robert D. Putnam (Harvard) and David E. Campbell (Univ. of Notre Dame) have been awarded the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon and Schuster). The Wilson Award of the American Political Science Assocation (APSA) recognizes the "best book published in the U.S. during the previous calendar year on government, politics, or international affairs".
visit our American Grace website
AMERICAN GRACE: How Religion Divides and Unites Us
by David Campbell and Robert D. Putnam, released in October 2010.
American Grace is a major achievement, a fascinating look at religion in today’s America. Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades, the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped.
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