community building

9 Tips for Putting Social Capital Into Action

Submitted by David B. Crowley on Fri, 06/22/2012 - 5:06am

Over 80 Massachusetts philanthropists gathered this week at Brandeis Unversity to explore the topic "Social Captial in Action", the theme of this year's Associated Grantmakers of Massachusetts annual meeting. Needless to say, I was pleased that the local funding community is focusing on this topic. I was happy to have a chance to moderate a panel following Tom Sander's excellent keynote presentation on the subject. Tom is the Executive Director of the Saguaro Seminar for Civic Engagement. He got everyone up to speed on some of the basic social capital definitions and trends, then focused on implications for funders. Tom also previewed some disturbing new data suggesting a widening "opportunty gap" among social classes in America. (This live blog of a recent talk by Robert Putnam provides more information on this research.) After hearing Tom's talk, we were all ready to think about ways we might build social capital and address the problems he framed.Read more

8 Community Building Lessons from the Farm

Submitted by David B. Crowley on Sat, 05/26/2012 - 5:36am

Want to learn some good tips for engaging volunteers and building community at your organization? Perhaps you should spend a morning at a local farm like I did yesterday! We wanted to get better acquainted with Nina and Archie McIntyre after Nina had come to one of our events awhile back. They offered to show us around Wright-Locke Farm (which I'll call "the farm" throughout this post) in nearby Winchester, MA, where they are passionate volunteer leaders. We suspected that there might be practical ways SCI might be able to connect with the farm around volunteer opportunities and some projects we are doing related to healthy food and community building.Read more