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 institutions. The resulting BetterTogether report was desigend not as a detailed civic engagement blueprint for
the twenty-first
century nor a cookbook
with thousands of potentially promising programs that may lead to civic
engagement. The BetterTogether report tried to unlock our civic imagination and publicize a few approaches, networks, organizations,
or strategies
that should be employed more broadly to build
social trust and reciprocity in neighborhoods nationwide and re-engage
America civicly. (For more information on the eight meetings leading to BetterTogether see the background here.)
Since 2000, the Seminar's mission is both to improve social capital measurement and 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.
SOCIAL CAPITAL PRIMER -
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").[more...]
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