The science of friendship

There is an interesting article by Robin Dunbar in The New Scientist: Dunbar’s Number was named after Robin, from his theorizing that humans only had the brain capacity to manage roughly 150 relationships, although depending on gender, social skills and personality, this number could vary from 100-250.  Dunbar observes that communication often breaks down when one exceeds 150 individuals (as evidenced in the Crimean War by the Charge of the Light Brigade) and the modern military and businesses only exceed these limits through strict hierarchies.

Dunbar theorizes that language, laughter and communal music-making evolved as a way to stay connected to a larger group of individuals than possible through physical acts like grooming. Dunbar: “[N]ot only can we speak to many people at the same time, we can also exchange information about the state of our networks in a way that other primates cannot. Gossip, I have argued, is a very human form of grooming.”  Christakis and Fowler (in the excellent book Connected) note that “…language is a less yucky and more efficient way to get to know our peers since we can talk to several friends at once but only groom them one at a time.  In fact, in a conversation with a small group, we can assess the behavior, health, aggressiveness, and altruism of several individuals simultaneously.  Plus, we can talk to someone else while engaged in another activity, like foraging for food in a refrigerator.”  Christakis and Fowler note how radical the idea is that language evolved not primarily as a way to exchange information but to maintain group cohesion.   “Dunbar estimates that language would have to be 2.8 times more efficient than grooming in order to sustain the [average] group size seen in humans” (one speaker per 2.8 listeners).

While language may have originally evolved, as per Dunbar, to maintain a slightly larger group size, once developed it was in principle possible to use language to maintain social relations on a tribal or national level.

A few other excerpts from Dunbar’s article:

Group living needn’t tax your intelligence too much. In a loose herd, cues such as body size or aggressiveness may be enough to judge whether you should challenge or steer clear of another individual. In bonded networks, however, you need to know each member’s personal characteristics and those of the friends and relations that might come to their aid. Keeping track of the ever-changing web of social relationships requires considerable mental computing power.

As a reflection of this, there is a correlation between the size of a species’ brain– in particular its neocortex– and the typical size of its social groups. In other words, brain size seems to place a limit on the number of relationships an individual can have. This link between group size and brain size is found in primates and perhaps a handful of other mammals that form bonded societies such as dolphins, dogs, horses and elephants. In all other mammals and birds, unusually large brains are found only in species that live in pair-bonded (monogamous) social groups.

As group size increases so too does the number of relationships that need servicing. Social effort is not spread evenly. Individuals put most effort into their closest relationships to ensure that these friends will help out when they need them. At the same time they maintain the coherence of the group. As a result, social networks resemble a nested hierarchy with two or three best friends linked into larger groupings of more casual friends, and weaker relationships bonding the entire group. This hierarchy typically has a scaling ratio of three– each layer of decreasing intimacy is three times larger than the one before it….

HUMAN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Our social networks can have dramatic effects on our lives. Your chances of becoming obese, giving up smoking, being happy or depressed, or getting divorced are all influenced by how many of your close friends do these things. A good social network could even help you live longer since laughing with friends triggers the release of endorphins, which seem to “tune” the immune system, making you more resilient to disease. So what factors influence the form and function that our social networks take.

In traditional societies, everyone in the community is related to everyone else, either as biological relatives or in-laws. In post-industrial societies this is no longer true– we live among strangers, some of whom become friends. As a result, our social circles really consist of two separate networks– family and friends– with roughly half drawn from each group.

Because the pull of kinship is so strong, we give priority to family, choosing to include them in our networks above unrelated individuals. Indeed, people who come from large extended families actually have fewer friends. One reason we favour kin is that they are much more likely to come to our aid when we need help than unrelated individuals, even if these are very good friends.

Family and friend relationships differ in other important ways, too. One is that friendships are very prone to decay if untended. Failure to see a friend for six months or so leaves us feeling less emotionally attached to them, causing them to drop down through the layers of our network hierarchy. Family relationships, by contrast, are incredibly resilient to neglect. As a result, the family half of our network remains constant throughout most of our lives whereas the friendship component undergoes considerable change over time, with up to 20 per cent turnover every few years.

More than 60 per cent of our social time is devoted to our five closest friends, with decreasing amounts given over to those in the layers beyond, until at the edge of the 150 layer are people we perhaps see once a year or at weddings and funerals. Nevertheless, the outer reaches of our social networks have a positive role to play. The sociologist Mark Granovetter at Stanford University in California has argued that these weak links in our social networks are especially useful in the modern world. It is through this widespread network of contacts that we find out about job vacancies and other economic or social opportunities. More importantly, perhaps, 70 per cent of us meet our romantic partners through these contacts.

Read “Getting Connected” by Robin Dunbar (New Scientist, 4/3/12)

Homeownership and Civic Engagement

There is a section in Bowling Alone on how homeowners are more involved civicly than renters. Barry Bluestone, Dean of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, at Northeastern University, was speaking to the Harvard Kennedy School Inequality Program today on “Is Homeownership Now Just a Dream?” Among discussions of who benefits from homeownership, he discussed whether we should support it and raised the issue of whether homeowners are better citizens, and if so, is it just due to their longer tenure in neighborhoods. Excerpt from his draft paper:

“To test the assertions made in the literature, we conducted our own analysis using data collected through the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) fielded in 2001/2002….In our analysis of the NSFH data, it was possible to investigate the impact of homeownership on a range of factors including the respondent’s optimism about their own life circumstances; on church attendance; on getting together with neighbors; on participation in group recreational activities; on the time they spend in local sports, hobby and discussion groups; and in the number of times they participate in the activities of local service clubs, fraternal organizations and political groups….  Essentially, this [our] analysis asks the following question: if renters had the same income, age, education, and residential tenure as homeowners, would they be as optimistic about their own lives and be as civically-engaged as exisitng homeowners?  Again, is there any benefit to homeownership per se? The results of this new analysis point to a number of individual and social benefits that accrue to homeowners even when compared to renters who have lived in the same place for nearly ten years and have equivalent social-economic status (SES) – income, education, and age.   On the one hand, the analysis finds no difference between homeowners and renters in church attendance, in getting together with friends, or in participating in group recreational activities.  On the other, homeowners tend to be more optimistic about their own futures, they participate more often in local sports and discussion groups, and most importantly they are more civically engaged in service organizations, fraternal groups, and political organizations… Before controlling for housing tenure and SES, 48.3% of homeowners report that they participated in sports, hobby, or discussion groups at least once a year; only 37.9% of renters reported such.  After controlling for these factors, the probability of renters participating in these activities increases to 39.8%.  Hence, homeownership per se appears to boost such participation by 8.5 percentage points or by more than 21 percent. Before controlling for housing tensure and SES, 37.5% of homeowners but only 27.2% of renters responded that they participated at least once a year in service clubs, fraternal organizations, or political groups.  After controlling for tenure and SES, renter participation appears to increase to 31.5%, still 6 percentage points less than homeowners.  That is, homeowners are 19 percent more likely to be active in these groups.

Bluestone seems sympathetic to homeownership.  His analysis is interesting but despite his effort to be “fair”, he likely overcontrols since he makes the highly unlikely assumption that one could have considerable number of renters with the same tenure as homeowners. One thing that Bluestone didn’t examine is how renters and buyers differ in their future intentions of rootedness and geographic mobility: only 25% of homeowners, when we conducted research for Bowling Alone, expected to move in the next five years versus two-thirds of renters.  If we had policies in America that left us with far more renters, it seems wishful thinking to imagine that most of them would remain in community for as long as the owners. And thus even on the measures where Bluestone doesn’t find that homeownership is associated with higher levels of engagement after his demographic controls (namely, socializing and  church attendance), homownership probably really is still associated with higher socializing and church attendance.  Homeownership works to increase rootedness (partly psychologically and partly financially) and this rootedness increases socializing and church attendance.

Bluestone also relayed an interesting and telling anecdote  about his hometown of Detroit.  Albert Cobo (Mayor of Detroit in the early 1950s) used the power of eminent domain to raze a poor community in downtown Detroit to prepare for highway expansion that never occurred.  After the highway fell through, African-Americans’ hopes that the razed area would soon be rebuilt,  the suburbs of Detroit were developed, but the area razed by Cobo remained vacant.  Eventually the UAW developed a significant tract of housing in the razed area but insisted that all the homes be rental units.  Edison developed a community across the street, even hiring the same architect to give the other community the same look and feel.  Bluestone notes that while these areas (the UAW rental tract and the Edison ownership tract) attracted similar residents, the Edison (home-owned) units have remained in much better condition as the owners have worked to preserve their investments and volunteered for neighborhood groups that preserved the more general environment.  My guess, although Bluestone didn’t say this, is that residential tenure was also much longer in the Edison ownership tract than in the UAW rental one.

The school for social capital?

The New American Academy, serving poor non-white  youth in Crown Heights, Brooklyn aims to reinvent education, but it may well be a strong contender for  building social capital as well.

Joel Klein, Former Chancellor,New York City Department of Education has written:

“The New American Academy [NAA] is an innovative, potentially very powerful way to provide education to children. It is both brilliant and scalable and holds out the hope of changing K-12 education in major ways.

This is a big idea, something we desperately need if we are going to significantly change the educational outcomes for our children.”

Educationally, NAA started in 2010 as a public school with kindergarten and first graders.  Each year they will add another grade until they reach fifth grade.  They assign 4 teachers to 60 students who they remain with from grades K-5. The teachers are compensated and promoted based on performance their 60-student flock as well as on peer and supervisory review.  OneMaster teacher (paid $120,000 annually) helps supervise the overall direction among 3 less senior teachers who rotate among 3-4 tables.

The school was founded by a  Shimon Waronker, “who grew up speaking Spanish in South America, became a U.S. Army intelligence officer, became an increasingly observant Jew, studied at yeshiva, joined the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, became a public schoolteacher and then studied at the New York City Leadership Academy, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the former New York Schools chancellor, Joel Klein, founded to train promising school principal candidates.” While a doctoral student in Harvard’s Urban Superintendents Program, he conceived the NAA educational approach based on the elite Phillips Exeter Academy and in 2009 won Harvardʼs Phi Delta Kappa Award for Innovation in Education.

Waronker, a Hasidic Jew, who sports a long bears and wears a black  suit,  black hat and a velvet kippa, seems an improbable leader for a non-white inner city school.  But he gained credibility after reviving the failing extremely violent Jordan Mott School  in the depressed South Bronx and overcoming parental wariness ultimately to gain the trust of parents and students.

In principle, the school seems unusually well-designed to promote social capital building among the students and teachers.  There is a high mix of teamwork, the students get a lot of practice in honing civic skills (like making presentations) and sit around larger tables participating in teacher-led group discussions.

“The teachers are not solitary. They are constantly interacting as an ensemble. Students can see them working together and learning from each other. The students are controlled less by uniform rules than by the constant informal nudges from the teachers all around.” [David Brooks]

“He has a grand theory to transform American education…. The American education model, he says, was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create docile subjects and factory workers. He wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today.” [Brooks]

Brooks says NAA “does a tremendous job of nurturing relationships. Since people learn from people they love, education is fundamentally about the relationship between a teacher and student. By insisting on constant informal contact and by preserving that contact year after year, The New American Academy has the potential to create richer, mentorlike or even familylike relationships for students who are not rich in those things.”

The school is important for at least two reasons.  Much social capital research and socialization research demonstrates that “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree”.  These early years are a critical time to teach the soft non-cognitive skills that are increasingly valuable in today’s society like teamwork, building relationships, negotiating differences, etc.  So this early experience in building social capital, if successful, could be an important model.

Second, we are increasingly discovering in our own research that working class kids (white and non-white) are increasingly falling through society’s cracks and are falling further and further behind their counterparts from more affluent and educated backgrounds.  While it is still to be proven, NAA seems to offer promise for what schools could do to start to close these gaps among kids who happened to be born on the wrong side of the tracks.

I look forward to the research that compares the educational and social outcomes of kids attending NAA against their matched counterparts who don’t.

Read David Brooks’ “The Relationship School” in the NYT (3/23/12)

Read “60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Loud Way to Learn” (NYT, 1/11/2011) [Slide show here.]

Having few friends predicts early death as much as smoking or alcoholism

“Low social interaction as high a risk factor for early death as smoking 15 cigarettes daily or being an alcoholic, and twice the risk factor of obesity.”

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at BYU, published a recent meta-analysis with Timothy Smith and J. Bradley Layton (that culls from learning across 148 longitudinal health studies covering over 300,000 individuals). They showed that increased involvement in social networks on average reduces one’s chance of mortality over the period of any particular study by 50+%, a greater effect than either stopping smoking or eliminating one’s obesity/physical inactivity.

The study “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review” appears in the journal PLoS Medicine.  They controlled for baseline health status,  and found consistent results for friendships with family, friends, neighbors and colleagues across age, gender, initial health status, cause of death, and follow-up period.

The life-protective benefits of friendship were strongest for complex measures of social integration and lowest for simple measures of residential status (e.g., living alone versus with others) .  In studies that had greater dimensions of social involvement (whether one was in a network, the kinds of social support one got, etc.), the life-protecting benefits of friendships were higher, likely corresponding to the multiple pathways through which friendships provide benefits.

Low social interaction, according to the authors, was as high a risk factor for early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic.  Low social interaction was a higher risk factor than not exercising and twice as high a risk factor for early death as obesity.

Co-author Tim Smith noted: “We take relationships for granted as humans – we’re like fish that don’t notice the water….That constant interaction is not only beneficial psychologically but directly to our physical health.”

The longitudinal studies they analyzed tracked health outcomes and social interaction for a period of seven and a half years on average.

The 50% increased survival rate is quite likely an underestimate: these longitudinal studies don’t track relationship quality but only one’s inclusion in a social network, so they include negative relationships as well. Survival benefits of friendships are likely to be much higher if one could isolate only positive and healthy social relationships.

Holt-Lunstad speculated that the pathways of social relationships to improved longevity stem range from  “a calming touch to finding meaning in life.” She believes that those who are socially connected take greater responsibility for others’ and their own lives and take fewer risks.

Here is key Figure 6 from their study:

Unlike some other work, such as Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave, where shut-in elderly were especially at risk of death in Chicago’s 1995 heat wave, the findings of Holt-Lunstad are generalizable to all age groups.

An ardent plea to our better political angels

Lew Feldstein gave a terrific “Thanksgiving Breakfast” talk touching on themes of the common weal, politics, and the need to find common ground.  This talk was given November 22, 2011 to the New Horizons for New Hampshire (a Manchester non-profit that helps the homeless).  With his permission, I’m posting it.

“148 years ago, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery  in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was four and a half months after the devastating battle, and it was a foggy, cold morning. Lincoln arrived about 10 a.m. Around noon, the sun came out as the crowds gathered on a hill overlooking the battlefield. 15,000 people.  A military band played, a local preacher offered a long prayer, and the headlining orator, Edward Everett, spoke for more than two hours. Everett described the Battle of Gettysburg in great detail, and he brought the audience to tears more than once. When Everett finished, Lincoln spoke .

The Gettysburg Address ran for just over two minutes, fewer than 300 words.   Only 10 sentences.

Among the first lines are these, familiar to us all:

‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war….’

And so we are, now, in the late Fall of 2011.    Here,  in Manchester, soldiers may not be killing one another, bullets are not flying, but can any of us doubt that, at least metaphorically,  this country is at war, that armies are arrayed against one another,  that…as President Lincoln put it:  ‘we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated,  can long endure.’

‘We are’, as President Lincoln said, ‘met on a a great battle field of that war.’   As we meet today, a war that tests our county is being fought out across this land in its most disheartening, and discouraging form, by our elected reps in Washington, but also here, in Manchester, right now, and in every town and city, in every state in the nation,  as competing sides gird themselves for the coming elections.

As surely as tanks and cannons can destroy a nation, so can a nation  be destroyed from within, by the unwillingness or inability  to resolve structural problems that, left unresolved, will destroy  the economy and the nation with every bit as much destructive power and finality as bombs and bullets.   Obstinance, adherence to the certitude that I am right and you are wrong, the inability of our leaders to resolve differences, to find common ground, can all be fatal.

We don’t have to look any further than the daily news to see the impact on other nations of their failures to change their ways.

Or, to bring it home, today’s lead story: the failure of “the Super Committee.”

That we reach this point at this season, at Thanksgiving and the Holidays, is especially painful.   That I make this the subject of my Thanksgiving Breakfast talk may feel inappropriate, or uncomfortable, or just plain bad manners.

It is uncomfortable.

But to gather at this time, to mark the eve of  Thanksgiving and  not speak of this, not acknowledge it, would be far worse than uncomfortable.

It would be  criminal.

It is not enough for us, as citizens, to just listen to the news,  curse the enemies, wring our hands,  and then retreat to the cocoons of our daily lives.

We need to be heard.  We need to tell those we elect that they must change how they represent us.

What hubris!  What arrogance!  To believe that your side is so right,  that you have all the wisdom.

We say to them: Will you destroy this nation in the name of saving it?

It is not acceptable to lay all the blame and responsibility on the other side.

We must tell our leaders that they must move.

They must find common ground.

This morning is not the time nor the place to work thorough the competing sides, to assign rights and wrongs.

Thanksgiving starkly juxtaposes the threat that this ugly, unyielding, and unnecessary stalemate  poses to all that we have to be thankful for.

We can do it. We can get through this terrible logjam. We can find our way to a better future.

What could be better evidence of the promise of the American people, the innate goodness and willingness to row together , than this extraordinary institution, New Horizons, which brings 1,000 of us together this morning.

Here we are in the state that:

• For the past five years has been rated “the most livable state,”
• For the fourth straight year has been rated the best state in which to raise a child;
• Has the lowest poverty rate in the country;
• Has the least amount of income inequality;
• Has the lowest tax burden; and
• Has the highest average income.

And yet where one out of four Manchester children are growing up in poverty.

Where scores of families are without shelter every night.

And hundreds of our neighbors cannot feed themselves throughout the year.

As a community we have come together to meet these needs: to house, to  feed , to shelter, to care for our neighbors.

This community takes care of one another.  This is no mean feat in these times.  This is a city infused with high social capital — you know I would work this in — high trust in one another, strong norms of reciprocity,  where helping out is the most natural of things.

And thus it has always been in Manchester going back more than a century.  The city has changed, the business base has changed, the countries of origin of the immigrant and refugee groups that have moved through it have changed, but the strong ties of mutual support, the underlying social capital has remained, strong and enduring.

No small feat.

This trust, this social capital, is the core of why this city is special.  It speaks volumes about the city’s capacity to prosper in good times, and to work through the kinds of big ripping changes in the industrial base, as the very economy of this city has morphed.

I end with thanks, and a prayer.

Thanks  for all who step up to help their neighbors, who put aside differences of  politics and religion and race, even differences between Sox fans and this lonely Yankee fan [Feldstein speaking of himself],  to give of themselves for the common weal, who have built this great agency as testimony to what we can be, what we can do.

And the Prayer that we find common ground.

That our leaders  – on all sides – step away from their certitude, look inward to acknowledge the limits of man, to be far more modest about our individual wisdom, to see for what it is the weakness that compels blind adherence to a single point of view, and look outward to acknowledge that the public that elects them is  far more nuanced  – and far more conciliatory –  then the extremes held up by our elected reps, who through their acts and our own have driven our nation to this terrible impasse.

Please please find common  ground.

Abandon your certitude that only you are right, that only you know the answers.  Don’t destroy our nation.  But take us  together to a better place.

We have done it before.

Get us there again.”

Using bicycle thefts as measurement of trust

(photo by Ned Lyttelton)

Other experimenters have tested community-trustworthiness by dropping “lost wallets” in communities with a small amount of money and an ID card that says “If lost, please return to Mr. XXX  at YYY address.]  By dropping wallets randomly in different communities, they can measure the percentage of wallets returned intact (without the money missing).  It turns out that such empirical measures correlate strongly with the percent of neighborhood residents who report that others can be trusted.  [See also my earlier post on a related topic.]  So, it’s not just that in some communities people are drinking funny water….   One recent researcher (a bit less scientific) dropped those wallets and then videotaped those taking the wallets.

A idea from Mariano Pasik, a community advocate and publicist in Buenos Aires, Argentina is that community members should leave out bicycles and then film to see what percent of them are taken and over how short a period.  One can imagine that if people did this in communities across the world, one could use a mashup to present these data on an empirical measure of trust (although it is not always clear whether the thieves are community residents or outsiders).

TY to PSFK for a heads-up about this.

City-wide social capital building efforts [UPDATED 3/2/12]

Connector Project

People frequently ask me of examples of city-wide efforts to build social capital.  The are several examples in Better Together of Tupelo, MS and what Portland did with city boundaries. Beyond this, Seattle had an interesting program called the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods’ Neighborhood Matching Fund (that provided mini-grants for neighborhood improvement efforts where residents provided matching sweat equity), Minneapolis’ Neighborhood Revitalization Program (where city power was devolved to local neighborhoods to set priorities), and the interesting Front Porch Alliance under Indianapolis Mayor Steve Goldsmith (which has not been as vigorously advocated in subsequent administrations).

NYC Service

I’m aware of several more contemporary examples:  NYC Service (and the Cities of Service effort to replicate this), Philadelphia’s Connector Program, and Social Capital, Inc.

NYC Service

Inspired by President Obama’s call for a new era of service, Mayor Bloomberg in his January 2009 State of the City address announced that New York City would lead the way in responding.

After consulting with volunteer groups that worked in the arts, with students, and with seniors to learn what was most needed, they launched NYC Service with Diahann Billings-Burford as their inaugural Chief Service Officer.  NYC Service would enable NYC  to do more with less (since economic times were tight) and help harness volunteers in “impact service”.

NYC Service, in its several years, has achieved impressive results.  They have used citizens to vaccinate over half a million individuals against H1N1; engaged over 400,000 students in school-based volunteering; trained over 10,000 people in CPR who then trained additional New Yorkers; and coated two million square feet of rooftop under their “Cool Roofs” program with reflective white material to lower building’s cooling costs in the summer and help alleviate global warming.

They also launched the Civic Corps, a full-time group of AmeriCorps stipended volunteers who work in the Mayor’s Office or with city non-profits to help those non-profits mobilize volunteers.  The Civic Corps in FY11 recruited almost three quarters of a million volunteers, raised $1 million in cash and $6 million in non-cash donations, such as professional services, clothing, food and books.

Over 2,500 volunteer opportunities have been posted to NYC Service (their volunteer clearinghouse website) and they have garnered over 600,000 unique website visitors looking for volunteer opportunities.   Between their website and the Civic Corps, NYC Service has mobilized over a million NYC volunteers.

Although NYC Service does not directly track this, one of the most important outcomes (above and beyond how many success mentors they train or how many square feet of roofs they paint white), is the social capital and civic engagement that NYC Service instills.  Studies have shown that for many governmental objectives (say keeping streets safe or increasing academic performance), a civic engagement strategy (through neighbors knowing each others’ first names or parents being more involved in their kids’ learning) is more efficacious than a top-down government-funded approach.

NYC Service is undoubtedly increasing citizens’ sense of efficacy (that they can and are making a difference on issues like the environment or school readiness or dealing with truancy).  This increased efficacy is likely to cause more New Yorkers to intervene elsewhere (e.g., when someone has fallen on a street or is having a heart attack, or when a neighbor needs assistance).

Implicitly, much of what government does is remediating for gaps in civil society.  For example, social service and safety nets step in where family and neighbors don’t.  Police are necessary where social sanction and control is insufficient to police social norms.  Paid Fire Departments are needed when all-volunteer fire departments can’t fulfill their duties.

The social capital created by NYC Service is likely to have a significant impact, way above and beyond the value of volunteer hours (which are important and sizeable in-and-of themselves).  Greater local participation down the road is likely to lead to: a) better crafted and more responsive local policies; b) better performing and less corrupt government since the civic engagement and transparency will hold government officials accountable; c) greater net ability to change citizen behavior relative to an approach that relies on mandates (which are harder to get enacted and less popular); and d) potentially less of a need for government down the road, if engaged citizens do their jobs effectively.

Replication of NYC Service: NYC Service is already being replicated. Mayor Bloomberg held a competition (funded by Rockefeller) and a selection panel chose 10 cities from the cities that applied in June 2010.  These winners received $200,000 each to cover some of costs of a Chief Service Officer (which they had to hire) and received wraparound technical assistance (with work-planning, and project management).  Rockefeller and Bloomberg Philanthropies  announced a second grant round with 10 winners and awarded them in June 2010.

Bloomberg Philanthropies created a “learning community” around these 20 cities [see Cities of Service] with the goal of cross-fertilizing learning, experience sharing, and developing best practices.  The CSOs came together face-to-face 2-3 times during the first year, engage in bi-weekly group conference calls, and receive individual technical assistance.

Bloomberg Philanthropies created a “Cities of Service Playbook” that specifies a process they recommend for Cities of Service in coming up with a service plan.  CSOs in the first round were hired by May 2010 and these 10 were first convened in June 2010 and provided technical assistance.  The first group developed service plans in Sept. 2010.  The second group developed service plans by March 2011.  [The first group consisted of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Nashville, Newark, Omaha, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Savannah and Seattle.  The second group consisted of Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Chula Vista, Houston, Little Rock, Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Richmond.]

New cities have also agreed to develop high-impact service plans that were not grantees in these two competitive rounds.   Some of the original cities  now have the CSO position supported by their budget or have indicated  they will include the CSO in their budget.

We’ll look forward to hearing more about NYC Service and their replication efforts.

Philadelphia’s Connector Program:

Started by Liz Dow in 2005 as the Connector Project and based on Bowling Alone and Malcolm Gladwell’s work on connectors and the Tipping Point, they are now in their third iteration, and have renamed themselves Creative Connectors. They identify leaders who use arts, culture and design to build community and create economic vitality.  Liz was struck by the observation in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” that “poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.”

From their three years they have identified 10 traits in connectors (what they call “the Connector Competency Model”) and convened these connectors to connect them with each other.

Liz wrote up her experience in 6 Degrees of Connection and a fuller description of the ten competencies which cutely spell out “CONNECTORS”:

1. C: Community Catalyst
2. O: Other-oriented
3. N: Network Hub
4. N: Navigating Mazes
5. E: Empowering Passion
6. C: Constantly Curious
7. T: Trustworthy
8. O: Optimistic
9. R: Results Achiever
10. S: Self-Starter.

The list of creative connectors was generated by an online survey circulated by partner organizations and through an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  While these connectors are important in Philadelphia, 3 out of 4 of the leaders identified had moved to Philadelphia from somewhere else, and they generally work in the non-profit sector.  Creative Connectors also looks for leaders who:

• “are hubs of trust, seen as trustworthy and credible.
• use art and design to mobilize people around an issue.
• foster one-to-one linkages among people they know.
• engage with diverse groups.
• consider the common good as well as personal agendas.
• convey a vision that generates excitement.
• think strategically, act decisively.
• have founded an organization or program.”

Each Connector was profiled and NPR will do a video on each one weekly over the next year.

Philadelphia’s Creative Connectors is being replicated by some other groups including Leadership Louisville and the Portland Connector Project.  [And I’ve learned that a Boston connector network already exists, no relation to the effort in Philadelphia, see comment below about Boston World Partnerships.]

Last week, Leadership Philadelphia convened all of the Connectors since 2005 to thank them for their contribution to the community, to connect them with the newest connectors, to have them brainstorm on an issue raised in Knight’s Soul of the Community report, and to send them out into the community to make a Pay It Forward contribution.  The latter was a gift of $50 cash with the instruction that they give it to someone in Philadelphia who needs it, and to report back to Leadership, stirring up some grassroots goodwill during the holidays.

Leadership Philadelphia has also initiated a This I Believe project, partnering with the local NPR station to have leaders and then other citizens write and then read their belief statements on air.

Read a news report on their most recent meeting of all their Connectors.   The group that launched Creative Connectors, Leadership Philadelphia has a website here.  The Connector Project website available here.

Social Capital, Inc.

Inspired by reading Bowling Alone, David Crowley, whom I regard as an unofficial mayor of social capital, decided to launch Social Capital, Inc.

David was moving to Woburn, MA (his home town) at the same time as he was inspired to see what he could do at a local level to rebuild social capital.  He launched SCI and focused on trying to increase social capital in Woburn.

As David puts it: “The process of reconnecting to his home community after some 12 years of living elsewhere provided tangible examples of barriers to building social capital in today’s society, but also suggested that there were many community assets that could be harnessed through collaborative, community-wide social capital building initiative. The basic idea of developing a local model that could be replicated in order to address the decline of social capital and civic engagement was born.”

SCI Woburn was launched in summer 2002. In 2004, SCI expanded to Dorchester and in 2006-07, SCI began work in Lynn.  They have now expanded to Fall River and Milford.

SCI sees their mission as developing new “social capitalists” and believes it can train young people in the “unique set of skills and attitudes that enables them to collaborate effectively, make connections, bridge differences, and nurture social networks to make a difference. David is an ardent evangelist for social capital.  They are in the process of developing tools for would-be social capitalists and we will let you know when those become available.

In 2010-2011, here are some of SCI’s accomplishments.

• SCI AmeriCorps members recruited over 2,500 community volunteers and a almost 70,000 residents of  Dorchester, Boston, Fall River, Milford, Lynn and Woburn have benefitted from their service. The AmeriCorps members & volunteers served almost 50,000 hours with a market value of $1.25 million (based on Independent Sector’s rates for volunteer service)
• 240 youth and other emerging leaders developed Social Capitalist skills with SCI this year.
• Over 4,015 food & clothing items have been generated by SCI AmeriCorps members and volunteers for people in need during these difficult economic times.
• Over 12,500 individuals use an SCI community portal every month to connect with local civic happenings.

No foreclosure from gift debt

Flickr/martingommel

Thomas Meaney, recently reviewed David Graeber’s DEBT: The First 5,000 Years for the NYT Book Review.  [Graeber helped inspire the Occupy Wallstreet movement.]

Meaney writes:

In 1925 the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss published his classic essay “The Gift,” which argued that contrary to the textbook account of primitive man merrily trading beaver pelts for wampum, no society was ever based on barter. The dominant practice for thousands of years was instead voluntary gift-giving, which created a binding sense of obligation between potentially hostile groups. To give a gift was not an act based on calculation, but on the refusal to calculate. In the societies Mauss studied most closely — the Maori of New Zealand, the Haida of the Pacific Northwest — people rejected the principles of economic self-interest in favor of arrangements where everyone was perpetually indebted to someone else.

Picking up where Mauss left off, Graeber argues that once-prevalent relationships based on an incalculable sense of duty deteriorated as buying and selling became the basis of society and as money, previously a marker of favors owed, became valuable in its own right….

So what, then, is to be done? Graeber finds reasons for hope in some unexpected places: corporations where elite management teams often operate more communistically than communes; in the possibility of a Babylonian-style Jubilee for Third World nations and students saddled with government loans; and from his own study of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, who he claims were adept at evading the snares of consumer debt encouraged by the state. But there is a sizable gulf between Graeber’s anthropological insights and his utopian political prescriptions. “Debt” ends with a paean to the “non-industrious poor.” “Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent . . . enjoying and caring for those they love,” Graeber writes, they are the “pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-destruction.”

It’s an old dream among anthropologists — one that goes back to Rousseau. In 1968, Graeber’s own teacher, Marshall Sahlins, wrote an essay, “The Original Affluent Society,” which maintained that the hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic period rejected the “Neolithic Great Leap Forward” because they correctly saw that the advancements it promised in tool-making and agriculture would reduce their leisure time. Graeber approves. He thinks it’s a mistake when unions ask for higher wages when they should go back to picketing for fewer working hours.

Michael from the Front Porch Forum (FPF) in Burlington, VT writes in response to Meaney’s quote that he loves that others in his FPF community in Burlington have undertaken a voluntary life of ‘favor debt’ (owing someone a favor) in place of monetary debt:

“Perpetually indebted to someone else”… this sums up so much of what I love about my community life in Burlington, VT right now….

I was raised to value making my contribution to others while taking great pains to avoid accepting the same from others.  So were lots of folks here.  But that’s a recipe for setting yourself apart, for isolation.  As my family has learned to accept favors from those around us, it’s made our contributions to others that much more meaningful and personal.

Now, through Front Porch Forum, MealTrain, our church, school, neighborhood and other means, we ask and offer favors daily from hundreds of friends, neighbors and acquaintances.  Each request works against isolation and lays down another thread in the web of community that supports our life.  This is a crucial asset… as much as our house, my job, the kids’ college savings.

My brother and his family are planning a holiday visit to see us in Vermont this month.  We could all jam into our house, but I know they would sleep better if we had more space for the two families.  Hotels are expensive and distant… B&Bs too.  So, I put the word out to neighbors and got several offers of empty houses that we could use on our block.  These neighbors are traveling out of state and are glad to share their home while they’re away.  We’ve done this a dozen times over the past few years… offering or asking for empty-house guest lodging.  Make that hundreds of times if we include other favors… meals, rides, tools, advice, kids stuff, labor, baby/pet sitting, on and on.

This is incredibly generous and trusting of all involved… but it’s also keeping each of us “perpetually indebted to our neighbors” in a way that makes our community stronger with each exchange.

It’s a wonderful description of generalized reciprocity of the sort that undergirds social capital as discussed in Bowling Alone.

See somewhat related earlier post “Economists ignore a critical third of economy: the social economy”

Hat tip to Lew Feldstein for spotting the FPF post.

Two recent articles on the importance of groups for health

Flickr/EdsonHong

Tina Rosenberg (author of the recently blogged about Join the Club) had two recent opinion pieces in the New York Times in November on how groups play a key role in healthy outcomes.

One “Fixes: For Weight Loss, a Recipe of Teamwork and Trust” (11/15/11) focuses on how patients are much more successful in trying to lose weight when they are in groups.

Another “Fixes: At a Big Church, a Small Group Health Solution”
discusses how Saddleback Church (also featured in Bob Putnam and Lew Feldstein’s Better Together) uses small-groups to encourage more healthy lifestyles of their members.

Tip o’ the hat to Lew Feldstein for these articles.

Social capital can alleviate youthful stressors that predict poor adult health

Flickr/meganskelly

Just finished a very interesting New Yorker article entitled “The Poverty Clinic” by Paul Tough that focuses on Nadine Burke who runs a San Francisco-based low-income health clinic and her conviction, supported by various studies, that youth trauma scars young people’s health for life.

They cite the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study of 1998 that showed that adults’ retrospective childhood ACE memories were a strong predictor of all kinds of negative adult health outcomes and this exhibited a dose-response linearity — i.e., exposure to more categories of childhood adversity meant both greater likelihood of negative adolescent outcomes (depression, suicide, binge drinking, etc.) and greater likelihood of poor adult health outcomes.

These ACEs measure youth stress in four areas: 1) physical; 2) sexual; 3) psychological; 4) substance abuse; 5) mental illness; and 6) criminal activity.  Actual list of items appended to this post.

While it is possible that these retrospective memories are flawed (i.e., sick adults are more likely to recall childhood stresses), a basically prospective New Zealand Dunedin study is finding the same thing for early trauma.  And Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller Univ.) and Frances Champagne (Columbia Univ.) have shown that “repeated, full-scale activation of this stress system, especially in early childhood…actually alerts the chemistry of DNA in the brain, through a process called methylation….This process disables these genes [methyl groups], preventing the brain from properly regulating its response to stress.”  Even a decade or more after the stress, these teenagers find it harder to sit still, exhibit higher rates of aggression, show weaker brain function, and can’t as adequately distinguish between real and imaginary threats.

While some doctors are looking at whether drugs (psychopharmacology) could have an impact, social capital can often overcome these stressors.

“Other researchers have produced evidence that they can mend children’s overtaxed stress-response systems by changing the behavior of their parents or caregivers.  A study in Oregon drew this conclusion after assessing a program that encouraged foster parents to be more responsive to the emotional cues of the children in their care.  Another study, in Delaware, tracked a program that promoted secure emotional attachment between children and their foster parents.  In each study, researchers measured, at various points in the day, the children’s level of cortisol, the main stress hormone, and then compared these cortisol patterns with those of a control group of foster kids whose parents weren’t in the program.  In both studies, the children whose foster parents received the intervention subsequently showed cortisol patterns that echoed those of children brought up in stable homes.

“In terms of helping older children and adolescents who have experienced early trauma, the research is less solid.  There is evidence that certain psychological regimens, especially cognitive-behavioral therapy, can reduce anxiety and depression in patients who are suffering from the stress of early trauma.  But, beyond that, little is known…”

Kaiser Permanente started asking about these stressors on intake questionnaires, since the were markers of health problems in the same way as say high cholesterol was.  The article points out that eliminating the negative effects of four ACEs would lower the risk of heart attacks as much as lowering cholesterol below the warning threshold.

With regard to work we are currently doing on a growing social class gap among adolescent youth, it is possible that methylation and ACEs might help explain lingering and persistent growing social class gaps that we see among high schoolers over the last several decades.

Read “The Poverty Clinic” (New Yorker, March 21, 2011)

See earlier post “Doctors Prescribing Social Capital”

See early article on Childhood stressors and adult health: Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, Williamson DF, Spitz AM, Edwards V, Koss MP, et al JS. The relationship of adult health status to childhood abuse and household dysfunction. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998;14:245-258.

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Specifically ACE questionnaire asks whether:  parent or other adult in household (HH) often or very often swore at you, insulted you or put you down; often or very often acted in way that made you afraid that you would be physically hurt;  often or very often pushed, grabbed, shoved, or slapped you; often or very often hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured; person five+ years older than you ever touched or fondled you in a sexual way; had you touch their body in a sexual way; attempted oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you; actually had oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you; whether you lived with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic; lived with anyone who used street drugs; whether anyone in HH was depressed or mentally ill; whether HH member attempted suicide; whether your mother was treated violently ; whether your mother or stepmother was sometimes, often, or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her; whether mother/stepmother was sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard; whether mother/stepmother was ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes; whether mother/stepmother was ever threatened with, or hurt by, a knife or gun; whether HH member ever went to prison.