Joining and participating in one group cuts your odds of dying over the next year in half. Joining two groups cuts it by three quarters.
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.
SUMMER WORKSHOP ON INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN
BRITAIN AND THE U.S.
Sunday, June 13, and Friday, June 25 2010
Crewe Hall, Cheshire, UK
DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION - must be received by FEBRUARY 15, 2010
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.
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WE'VE ADDED A SOCIAL CAPITAL BLOG
These are the periodic musings, generally social capital-related but not always, of Thomas Sander, Executive Director of the Saguaro Seminar. We will also provide Saguaro programmatic updates and reports of other interesting data, research, or developments.
The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America announces an annual Legatum Research Fellowship to be based at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government to conduct important research on social capital, broadly defined.
Saguaro Seminar's Robert Putnam issues first paper discussing impact of diversity and immigration on social cohesion and civic engagement.
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").
2010 - 2011 Post-doctoral Saguaro Seminar Research Fellowship
The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America seeks applicants for a Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University to conduct research on social capital, broadly defined to include issues of social inequality, social solidarity, and civic engagement.
How joblessness hurts us all
By Thomas H. Sander and Robert D. Putnam
The unemployment rate has topped 10% for the first time in a quarter-century. More than one in six adults are unemployed or underemployed, the most since the Great Depression. By any measure this is troubling, but the long-term effects of unemployment are more devastating than most Americans grasp. Economists warn that high unemployment may persist for years.
President Nicholas Sarkozy of FRANCE convened a blue-chip Commission in 2008-2009 composed of 25 scholars (largely economists, with 5 Nobel Laureates, including its chair, Joseph Stiglitz, and including Robert Putnam) to advise the French government on how to effectively measure French well-being and whether GDP measurement was enough.
Preview some findings on religion and public life at Pew Forum
(about influence of Saguaro Seminar on President Obama) (6/12/09)