Important social capital readings seem to come in bunches, which lend themselves to roundup posts like this. These recent articles explore how social capital can address issues like health, obesity and poverty, and include some broader lessons on social capital and social networks. We also learned of a neat to app to encourage sharing among neighbors. Enough with the preview; on with our list of interesting social capital articles we’ve come across in the past few weeks. Please let us know if you’ve come across some good social capital reading that we should check out!
Social Networks as an Anti-Poverty Strategy The Crittenton Women’s Union places cultivation of social networks at the core of their strategy for serving low-income women. This new publication lays our their rationale and framework for focusing on networks, and shares how they put this into practice. In particular, they seek to create what they call “leveraging ties” to help their participants access opportunities and resources that can be a steppingstone out of poverty. We appreciate SCI AmeriCorps alum Anna Osburn sharing this one from her new employer!
Social Networks Help Kids Exercise More Peer pressure doesn’t have to be a bad thing! A new study highlighted in the Time Healthland article shows that children become more active when they associate with active peers. As you might suspect, the converse is true as well. The article also suggest that training active peer leaders could be a good way to increase activity level, an idea I’ve thought about before in thinking about social networks.
Bowling Alone, Healing Together Another article connecting social capital and health, this time focused on the delivery of health care. This study in the American Journal of Managed Care suggests social capital has been largely ignored among health care providers, but that there could be significant benefits to seeking to increase social capital between provders and patients and among patients themselves.
Share with your neighbors? There’s an app for that! Favortree is a new mobile app service that facilitates sharing of items among neighbors. Seems like a great way to build relationships as well as reduce waste and unnecessary expenditures (does everyone on the block need their own snowblower?). This article is from the Knight Foundaiton blog, which has funded the project.
The Currency of Social Change The Barr Foundation has been a leader in applying social network theory to community change efforts. This blog post by the Foundation’s Stefan Lanfer introduces a new case study,”Networking a City”, published recently in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The study examines how the Barr Fellows program has woven a diverse network of Boston nonprofit leaders, and shares the lessons they have learned in the process.
9 Tips for Putting Social Capital Into Action I figured I’d slip one of my posts in there in case you missed it! These tips came from the panel discussion that I moderated on this topic at the June Associated Grantmakers of Massachusetts annual meeting.
Originally published on my Social Capital Inc. blog.
