[Community Highlights] [Success Stories [1] [2][Press Release (PDF)]
[Survey Highlights (PDF)] [Public Policy]

Sometimes the most effective ways to build social capital require changes in public policies. The examples that follow are not specific positions that the Foundation has taken but are offered to suggest where such changes would improve the stock of social capital.

1. Smaller schools. Size matters. The smaller the schools the greater the likelihood that all children will feel and be connected, and that parents and the community can be engaged. In a number of communities, schools boards have moved to create smaller self contained schools within existing buildings.

2. Smart Growth. Every ten minutes travelling by car reduces a person's engagement in virtually every form of social capital - political, volunteering, religious, family time, schmoozing with friends. Smart growth reduces mindless sprawl that consumes our land and requires more and more time in our cars. Reactions against this sprawl are already seen in the backlash against big chain stores and suburban sprawl and the work of programs like "Main Street to strengthen small commercial town centers. And in the decisions by some Governors and state legislatures to concentrate development in existing communities, to use public control over highways, sewers and water lines to support existing communities and retard the spread of new development.

3. Cyber-Morrell Act. One hundred years ago America recognized that higher education needed to be made broadly available to the public and Congress passed the Morrell Act which created and supported America's great network of land grant universities. Recognize that the net can be powerful force in building community and that this is a "public good", even if it will not attract private investment nor pay a profit. Provide public support that underwrites technology's potential to network and bring us together, especially through the development of effective local community networks, while curbing technology's potential to isolate us and reduce us to passive and isolated observers of entertainment.

4. Service learning. Children learn to volunteer. The best school-based service learning programs require all students to do some volunteering work as part of their school curriculum.

5. Provide incentives to businesses for exemplary civic behavior through state and federal purchasing and contracting. Just as we now provide public incentives for companies that operate in ways that respect the environment.

6. Employment restrictions. Americans now work one additional month a year more than their parents' generation did fifty years ago. A century ago Americans gradually limited the conditions under which work can be required - they eliminated child labor, limited the hours of the workweek, and provided for workmen's compensation, provided for health benefits. The current balance needs to shift to protect family and personal time, and not treat the burden of caring for aging parents or children as purely private family obligations. The family medical leave act is only the first of such legislation marking a shift in national expectations and norms. Another example was the consideration by four state legislatures in 2000 on laws to limit mandatory overtime, and the law passed in one, Maine.

7. Social Capital Impact Statement. Require public agencies in their planning to file statements that illustrate the potential impact of any new program on the communities' stock of social capital. For example when the US Post Office Department proposes to close a small post office, and communities object that the post office plays a crucial role now as a local meeting place, the Postal Rate Commission dismisses these concerns as beyond what they are charged to consider. If the Commission was required to provide a Social Capital Impact Statement, they would at least have to give weight to the concerns. The same would be true when a school district considers building a new school that will serve a group of communities but that is located miles from each of the potential feeder communities.

Campaign Finance Reform. Give average citizens confidence that their participation makes a difference, by curing the immense power of money to dominate political campaigns.