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Foundations, nonprofits increase emphasis on social capital
Sunday, December 31, 2000 By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Her airy Penn Avenue art studio in Garfield is cluttered with works-in-progress, chairs and easels. She uses the first floor for her ceramics and painting studio and for teaching; the second and third floors are rented as studios to a handful of other artists. Occasionally, passers-by at 5018 Penn Ave. stop to tell Sigrid Shafagh that they like her front-yard garden or her wrought-iron fence.
When Shafagh opened Studio 407 in 1998, she was the first artist to do so in an area long-plagued by failing businesses, resident turnover and lack of amenities. The opening was aided by grants and loans that were part of a collaborative effort by two community development groups focused on re-energizing a 10-block area from Bloomfield to Lawrenceville.
Today, 400 artists call the neighborhoods along the Mathilda Street-to-Negley Avenue stretch home, along with a growing number of galleries, restaurants, businesses and Internet start-ups. Its metamorphosis into a viable community -- buoyed by financial help from local foundations and nonprofits -- is the essence of "social capital," the philosophy of building social ties that link people to one another. Ideally, those connections -- be they through the arts, health care, children's program or neighborhood safety efforts -- promote a community-building paradigm that nurtures cooperation, trust and shared goals, essentials of a strong, healthy society.
And here stands Sigrid Shafagh, not quite a colossus at the harbor entrance, but a landmark nevertheless.
"I don't know anything about social capital," Shafagh laughed. "But this community is such a positive thing. The change has been really tremendous."
People's assets, strengths
In making the case for building social capital, Harvard University professor Robert D. Putnam wrote this year in his book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" that it was time "to reweave the fabric of our communities." Putnam argues that declining social and civic bonds, caused by years of neglect, need to be reversed through increased "reconnections" of Americans with one another.
Across a disparate spectrum -- students' test scores, doctors' attentiveness to their work, earning levels, health, the fact that people are willing to sell a used car to friends at a lower price than to someone they don't know -- studies have shown that social capital may boost productivity and incomes, while its absence may hinder growth.
Foundations, Putnam says, offer many avenues for building stronger social capital. They have always considered themselves in the vanguard of social change. In a 1997 article, Kathryn E. Merchant, president and chief executive officer of The Greater Cincinnati Foundation, wrote that foundations traditionally "supported the major educational, cultural, health and human service institutions that make up civil society." Today, she says, foundations are beginning to use new approaches that utilize nontraditional processes and programs.
Merchant believes that such strategies for developing social capital should include grant making, support for community foundations, strategic initiatives, serving as liaisons between diverse groups of people and addressing public policy.
Essential in this "civil investing," according to Merchant, is the view that people be seen "as assets instead of problems. And results are measured by increases in capacity for collective action rather than program outcomes."
And investments need not require massive infusions of foundation money. The Claude E. Worthington Benedum Foundation's long-running Community Mini-Grants Program in West Virginia has built a successful track record of engaging people from different communities to work together on projects through a relatively minor financial outlay -- $300,000 last year out of the foundation's total giving of $15 million.
As part of the 10-year-old program, the foundation underwrites numerous small grants from $500 to $2,000 to communities for projects that involve participants in everything from strategic planning to fund raising. To date, 33 of West Virginia's 54 counties have participated in nearly 800 projects involving more than 3,000 residents.
"We see it as small amounts of money making a huge difference," said Beverly Railey Walter, the foundation's vice president of programs. "The impact you can have in a rural county by letting [people] design their training program ... and figure out which project works and sometimes go on to bigger and better things [is] a systems changer."
The concept of collective action is far reaching because it brings a broader focus to bear on solutions to community problems. For the Penn Avenue project, it meant the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation and Friendship Development Associates offering loans and grants -- through the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative -- to encourage artists to buy or lease buildings and refurbish them.
Other nonprofits and the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority played important roles in the rebuilding effort and the unique loan and grant fund. Those nonprofits were the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development, the Roy A. Hunt Foundation, the McCune Foundation and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Local Initiatives Support Corp.
Jeffrey Dorsey, arts district manager for the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative, remembered that when the program began three years ago, the concept of using arts to create a new community was new.
Now, he said: "What's really exciting about what's happening is that the artists who are moving here aren't moving here only because it's cheap [rental or homeowner] space. They are moving in and organizing events on their own."
The area's long-range plan, Dorsey said, includes luring grocery stores, banks and other commercial anchors.
"Our bottom-line mission is about building community," he said. "This is about community revitalization. And that takes a long time."
As the twig is bent ...
Thomas Sander is executive director of the Saguaro Seminar at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, a group that for the past three years has looked at ways for Americans to connect with each other. Sander, who works closely with Putnam on a number of fronts, said that while foundations in general were doing a good job in building social capital, they were not exempt from problems.
Sander says that while the number of foundations in the United States had grown from 28,000 in 1987 to about 50,000 now, and assets have nearly doubled during the same period from $115 billion to more than $300 billion, there has been a percentage decline in philanthropy, resulting in fewer dollars available to address key societal changes. Additionally, lower social capital in communities makes it harder to tackle -- and redress -- community woes. And Sander said that baby boomers' commitment has been "far lower than the social capital of their parents."
What the Saguaro Seminar has found, Sander said, is that social capital is best built through higher levels of extracurricular participation, hands-on civics education, service-learning programs that combine community service with educational objectives and programs that emphasize youth leadership and governance in their operations.
National youth-focused programs have sprouted up during the past several years with foundation help. Do Something is a network of nearly 3 million young people who work with educators to formulate their own vision of community change. Youths then design and implement specific community projects, turning their ideas into action.
Helen Schaefer teaches eighth grade at Brookline Regional Catholic School. She also is a Do Something community coach. Recently, eighth-graders attended an all-day workshop on peace and nonviolent conflict resolution. Schaefer is working with them as they teach other classes what they learned through role playing.
"All the classes are attempting to achieve the goal of a thousand acts of kindness and justice by Jan. 15," Schaefer said. "The student leaders are making links on a chain to represent our acts of kindness."
Common Cents was created in 1991 to work systematically to develop civic engagement among youths. This year, groups of students in 600 New York City schools collected 150 tons of pennies -- more than $500,000. Student groups known as "round tables" will decide where and how the money should be spent. Last year, the students made 900 grants to improve the city and its neighborhoods, including 169 community service projects.
City Year has proven itself to have the highest retention rate of any youth service corps in America -- 85 percent. It requires participants to register to vote, learn to file tax forms, be certified in First Aid/CPR and obtain library cards. Spending 40 hours a week in teams of 10, corps members achieve computer literacy and practice public speaking, conflict resolution, decision making and evaluation while working with the elderly and homeless.
"I don't know that there is an optimal demographic for beginning social capital programs," Sander said. "The fishing is easier among those born before 1930 since they are a more receptive audience.
"That said, getting youth engaged civically has a much longer term payoff. The aphorism 'as the twig is bent so grows the tree' applies quite well to civic engagement. This may be very fertile ground on which to build."
Jeffrey Palmer wasn't a member of any such civic groups while growing up. But during the eight years it took him to earn his sociology degree from the University of Pittsburgh, he supported himself by working in jobs ranging from janitor to senior buyer for the surgical services purchasing department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Today, Palmer is president and chief executive officer of Coordinated Care Network, a nonprofit health-care network coordinating 180 medical, social and behavioral health programs at 61 Allegheny County locations for 57,000 underserved and uninsured residents. It began in 1996 with support from the East Liberty Family Health Center's board -- Palmer was executive director of the center for nearly three years -- and $2 million in grants from 12 local and national foundations, and two individual donors.
Palmer, 34, calls his work "social entrepreneurship." Not only does he plan to break even by July 2003, but the network's preventive case management also is being used by two Medicaid HMOs already and being touted as a national model. One of the HMOs cites preliminary studies that show every 1,000 Medicaid patients using CCN services spent 40 to 50 fewer days per month in the hospital than the average for all plan members.
Palmer says three of the key elements of the care network are "faith, healing and spirituality." Putnam identifies religious faith as "a central fount of American community life and health." But Palmer believes his network "transcends religion."
Underserved urban communities, Palmer said, can face a multitude of problems. "In order for them to really go forward, they have to have hope," he said. "Hope is more of a theological thing than it is a medical or a social thing.
"That hope is powerful. It's loving and inclusive. We're here to help you, not to judge you."
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