OVERVIEW

STEP 1: Mobilizing Resources

STEP 2: Understanding Social Capital as it Relates to Organizational Mission

We recommend that you convene key employees in a social capital retreat to discuss their theory of how they expect that your program leads to increased social capital, beginning with a discussion of social capital. To that end, everyone at the table should have, at a minimum, read this section and this section on the forms of social capital. Here are also other recommended readings on social capital if you want to dig deeper.

Goal of the retreat: to develop a shared understanding of social capital and how the organization would like to build it or believes it is already building it.

Topics to consider:

WHAT TYPES OF SOCIAL CAPITAL TIES YOU ARE BUILDING? (expand)

WHAT ARE YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS? (expand)

HOW DOES ORGANIZATIONAL MISSION MAP ONTO SOCIAL CAPITAL? (collapse)

Task 2: How does social capital relate to the organization's mission?

Determining how social capital relates to the organization's basic mission may be difficult in some cases. The following questions may be helpful:

1) Across all of the services, activities, and events organized or provided by your organization, is one of the four social capital goals predominant?
2) If more than one of these goals is evident, do they reinforce or conflict with one another?

This task is important because it helps the organization determine what type of social capital should be the focus of its evaluation. Programs that aim, among other things, to strengthen ties between individual participants and their communities, however defined, would expect to be able to measure a strengthened community. If the main social capital aim of the program is to link participants to resources and opportunities in the larger society, however, an evaluation focused solely on community-bonding ties may be inappropriate. On the other hand, if an organization is trying to unify and mobilize a community to meet some challenge, it may not be sensible for it to evaluate the bridges built between community members and the whole society. In making these choices, an organization is not labeling the other kinds of ties as unimportant, but only as less central to its mission. Our measurement strategy will explore those relationships that we have identified as critical in greater depth, but include some questions on all aspects of social capital.

Ongoing example: how does social capital relate to Jumpahead mission?

WHAT COMMUNITY ARE YOU SERVING? (expand)

STEP 3: Identifying Program Links to Social Capital