Social capital grows out of the concrete interactions of people. The appropriate place to begin to explore the social capital implications of programmatic interventions, then, is to examine the types of social interactions embedded in the program.
Social capital is very diverse and complex. For an organization just beginning to evaluate its own social capital, it may make sense to focus on just one aspect of social capital, leaving other categories of social capital for later. By doing this, an organization can ensure that the evaluative venture doesn't take over the entire organization.
There are at least six classes of ties, which each comprise a category of social capital:
1) Linking program staff and volunteers to participants and their families. These ties are intended to improve program operation by improving information flow and building trust and cooperation between staff/volunteers and participants and their families.
2) Binding participants to participants. These ties get participants to work together, to provide support, information and collectively address common problems. The evaluation should be sensitive to the possibility that these ties extend beyond the boundaries defined by the program (for example, lasting friendships, or cooperation on different types of problems). Note: Achieving permanence is not the only way these ties can have a social capital effect. Through participant-to-participant interaction, individuals may acquire key skills that will facilitate creating new ties outside the program, or they may become interested and involved in the community in a other ways. This is why we need to measure how their general level of social connectedness and civic engagement has changed as well as their ties to other participants.
3) Strengthening community bonds. A special case of the "participant-to-participant" category arises when the program is open to or acts upon the whole community. In short, it treats the entire community as a participant. Although the particular goals of these programs will vary widely, embracing both bridging and bonding social capital, most seek to facilitate social capital creation by acting on each participant's attachment to the community. It is likely that the program expects to create few permanent participant-to-participant bonds (because other participants may be little more than faces in a crowd). [An example of this might be a campaign to invoke civic pride and identity with your town, such as a public awareness campaign showing different types of folks with the caption "We're Pittsburgh."]
4) Integrating participants into family and community. These ties integrate individual participants into family and community, either by re-attaching them to key personal support networks, replacing or augmenting those networks, or by enriching the range of ties each have with other members of the community. These ties to community are likely to be more instrumental: e.g. building character, providing community job referral networks or recreational programs.
5) Linking participants to the larger society. An extension of the family to community ties (discussed above) are social ties that link participants, or the whole community, to resources in the larger society. An example might be teaching kids about the larger metropolitan area in which they live, or adults about job opportunities in the whole regional economy. This category includes efforts to improve the whole community's ability to represent itself externally (to city or state government, for example).
6) Strengthening community organizations. Programs may facilitate the formation and operation of other community organizations that both build and represent a form of social capital. This intervention may be through training, material support (such as space, money, or printing), or mediation and meeting facilitation (leadership), or help with organization and mobilization.
Ongoing example: Check in with Jumpahead
