To be presented to the conference on Social Capital and Poor Communities: Building and Using Social Assets to Combat Poverty

Draft: February 1999

Mark R. Warren, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458

J. Phillip Thompson, Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, International Affairs Building, Room 728, 420 West 118th Street, New York, NY 10027

Susan Saegert, Professor of Environmental Psychology, and Director of the Center for Human Environments, City University of New York Graduate School and University Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, New York 10036-8099
 
 

Why has the concept of social capital provoked such widespread interest and such heated debate? In other words, why is it such a hot topic today? In our view, interest in social capital has been fueled by two historical developments: the simultaneous dominance and crisis of the modern state on the one hand, and of the modern corporation on the other. Neither the big state, in the form of large bureaucracies and large scale social engineering, nor the global corporation, can respond adequately to local particularities. Both institutions search for "commonalities' that can lay the basis for "general" policies that big organizations can implement. Neither are big government nor big corporations often required to pay much attention to local communities: they are so large that are not accountable to any particular community, even a large city. Moreover, big organizations are autonomous sources of power that compete with elected officials for influence over government policy. Because of a concentration of resources and administrative focus, they often retain more power than elected, and presumably more accountable, officials.

These organizations are so powerful that they threaten the stability and coherence of communities themselves. For example, black public opinion historically was forged largely through black churches and the black press, indigenous and rooted institutional forms. Today, externally centered institutions like television and corporate advertising play a powerful role in forging black attitudes, while black churches and press retain a shadow of their former influence. Similarly, government, through housing programs, welfare provision, and police and prisons, plays an unprecedented role in managing the lives of poor African Americans and other historically disadvantaged groups. Public bureaucracies, with little direct accountability to these groups, have failed to develop creative or sensitive solutions to the pressing problems of these communities.

Local communities lack forms to control large state and corporate institutions. Traditional kinds of popular advocacy have failed to engage communities broadly and exert a measure of power over these institutions. Three forms of organizing dominate today: appeals to individual self-interest (e.g. tax cuts), small group advocacy (such as community control), and single-issue group advocacy which can cut across local communities. The last two forms are both group organizing, of building social capital among people who feel tied together based upon real or imagined acquaintance or interaction. Both individual and the two forms of group advocacy lack the capacity to exercise leadership over big modern organizations -- government or corporate. The individual approach does not engage and expand social capital in a way that can build a sufficient basis of power. The small group approach does not include a planning and discursive process sufficient to overcome the narrowness of group interests.

Community members need to strengthen ties within their own communities in a way that they can become citizens with the capacity to discuss and evaluate policy alternatives in light of their own individual and group interests. But they also require the ability to communicate freely with members of other communities, to build social capital with others, so they can expand beyond the narrowness of the group to become leaders of the whole society. An inquiry into social capital seeks to address this great challenge. The concept of social capital offers the promise of more coherent and free lives for all members of society. But it offers special hope for those most vulnerable to the concentrated powers of state and market.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the larger challenge posed by the concept of social capital by setting a framework for our conference discussions about the role that social capital can play in combating poverty. The concept of social capital promises to offer important new strategies to combat poverty because it links questions of social organization to economic development and to political action, that is, to the ability of communities to pursue collective action for common purposes. A social asset-building approach offers the opportunity for members of poor communities to overcome their status as passive recipients of public and private programs, by achieving a measure of control over their own lives through active participation. The papers for this conference marshal impressive evidence that social assets contribute to the health, safety, education, political participation, and quality of life in poor communities. But the main goal of the conference is not to simply evaluate the good social capital can do, but to understand how it can be built in communities that most need to influence large financial and political institutions. This goal implies an affirmation that within the constraints of social organization, economics, politics, culture, and history, people can act collectively to change their circumstances and directs our attention to how this is done.

Interest in the concept of social capital has dovetailed with the emergence of a broad range of community revitalization initiatives in low income neighborhoods across the country. These initiatives bring outside resources into poor communities while at the same time seeking to strengthen community institutions and collective efficacy. In the context of the limitations of market and state action, these civil society initiatives may offer significant new directions in combating poverty. But scholars have only begun to study them. And we lack a compelling theoretical framework with which to analyze these initiatives, to assess their strengths and limitations, and to identify promising directions that can be supported and broadened. The concept of social capital provides a useful framework to investigate these initiatives because it directs our attention to how social organization and norms of cooperation, both within a community and in its relationships to outside institutions, affect its development.

Such a framework can help us identify policies that build on the social ties, indigenous leadership, cultural traditions, and moral values through which poor communities survive. But, for individuals and families in poor communities to move beyond daily survival to act collectively for community betterment, they require mediating institutions that ensure a real measure of control over the effective development of their community.

In our view, the concept of social capital loses its meaning and effectiveness the further it becomes removed from specific kinds of institutions, like churches, schools, and tenant associations. Communities build and use their social capital within specific institutional settings, or within less formally organized social settings, and for specific purposes. Some studies, e.g. Robert Putnam's (1993) study of Italy, have treated social capital as a universal cultural resource that transcends the concrete social institutions and relationships in which it is embedded. But social capital, unlike money, is not a universal cultural resource, anonymous and fungible. It is tied to specific organizational forms and for specific purposes, which matter for combating poverty. Macro level studies of social capital as a general cultural resource lose the specificity of how social capital actual operates, masking important differences in the roles of different forms of social organization (Foley and Edwards 1998).

As a structural feature of communities, social capital is fundamentally rooted in the cultural traditions and institutional forms of those communities, as well as within the physical spaces that they occupy. People who trust each other and cooperate within a group for a specific purpose may have a general resource available for some other cooperative endeavor. Social capital contains an aspiration towards universality. But, at the same time, it cannot escape its structural bonds. The transfer from one purpose to another is by no means automatic. In a classic study Aldon Morris (1984) shows how activists worked to transfer the trust, cultural traditions and networks of followers and leaders embedded in southern black churches to support the emerging civil rights movement. But not all churches made that transition. And, in any case, it took effort -- the translation was not automatic.

Attention to the purposes to which social capital is put, or for which it was formed, allows the transferability (or benefits) of any particular form of social capital to anti-poverty efforts to be variable, subject to empirical investigation. Some forms of social capital are highly exclusionist, narrow in group orientation, or in other ways contrary to community well-being and the public good (Portes 1998). The mafia contains social capital, but directs it illegally and towards narrow group gain at the expense of others. Members of racially exclusive resident associations trust each other and work together, but against the common good more broadly conceived. Gangs represent complex phenomena, but their operation also suggests that social capital does not always represent a net gain for communities.

Most forms of social capital within poor communities represent at least potential contributors to anti-poverty and community revitalization strategies. But that potential can vary, or they might contribute in different ways. For example, the personal-familial ties of some immigrant groups contribute to family survival and advancement, but have been more disconnected from action in the public realm. Certain forms of social capital, like some churches, may make critical contributions to community development because they engage trusted leaders motivated by religious commitments to act to support their communities. Yet that social capital may not be available to address certain critical needs, like birth control or the health issues of gay residents.

An institutional and process oriented approach allows us to move from a discussion of the potential of various forms of social capital to an examination of their actual practice. We are interested in examining norms of cooperation and trust as they are connected to what people actually do -- in particular, the processes of community-building and collective action. We want to specify the mechanisms important to building and using social capital, to processes like leadership development, will-formation and relationship-building. We want to identify the types of people in these institutions and networks who play key roles in building and using social capital.

In our view, we must use an institutional approach to examining the processes of building social capital at four levels: within communities, across communities, to financial and political institutions, and nationally.

• within communities: bonding social capital. Strong local institutions are necessary to integrate individuals into society and to bind them together to pursue collective needs and aspirations. Strong internal bonds and effective organizations provide the foundation upon which poor communities can develop the capacity to address the problems of poverty, to achieve a measure of empowerment and control over their lives.
• across communities: bridging social capital. While local organization is essential, poor communities cannot address the problems of poverty simply by building social capital within themselves. Moreover, strong communities can be closed, limited, hostile to others, possibly even corrupt. By themselves, they do not overcome the social isolation faced by poor communities. To be effective, community revitalization efforts must balance the "bonding" social organizations they build with "bridging" ties to other communities. Bridging ties will bring resources and opportunities into poor communities, and provide the basis for strengthening the social fabric of the national society, thereby creating a national consensus for combating poverty.
• with financial and political institutions: creating synergy. Poor communities and their allies in civil society cannot solve their problems on their own. The causes of, and the solutions to, inner city decline lie within the larger processes of a global economy and of government action. Effective anti-poverty initiatives need to create what scholars of development have called synergy, that is, cooperative relationships among community based organizations, financial institutions and public agencies.
• nationally: towards social transformation. Finally, social capital building cannot be limited to the local level, while mainstream institutions operate unreformed. Local roots do provide a critical foundation for effectiveness because they provide intimate knowledge, trust, and a respect for the diverse needs of communities. But, to become a coherent alternative, local efforts must find a way to link their efforts to become a force for national transformation. Broader social transformation will be necessary to address the economic, political and social processes that create and reproduce poverty in the first place.

WITHIN COMMUNITIES: BONDING SOCIAL CAPITAL

Strong social bonds and effective organizations within communities provide the foundation upon which poor people can develop the capacity to address the problems of poverty, to rebuild their communities, and to achieve a measure control over their lives. The social support and solidarity of immediate communities supply a critical basis upon which people can rely to develop their capacities as leaders of the whole society. Creating and strengthening "bonding" social capital is the foundational task for anti-poverty strategies because strong community institutions are essential to integrating individuals into society and to develop citizens capable of public action in their own community. Moreover, if poor communities want to intervene in the broader society, to develop the leadership of their members in mainstream institutions, they will need to rely upon strong internal institutions. Therefore, we must consider the processes of building social capital within communities as a first step. To do so, however, requires a clear understanding of social capital as a collective asset for communities.

In our view, social capital can best be understood as a collective asset, as a feature of communities, rather than the property of an individual. Social capital refers to a set of resources that inhere in relationships of trust and cooperation between and among people. As such, individuals both contribute to it and use it, but they cannot own it. As with any common good, some may benefit individually at the expense of the larger group. But in the long run and on average, there must be a balance between contributing to the common good and benefiting from it if the good is to continue to exist at all.

When we refer to poor communities, we define community primarily as a territorial unit or place that is inhabited over time by people who are on average persistently poor. This approach allows for the level of social organization and the nature of norms and collective consciousness to vary (Sampson 1999). Occupying a shared territory requires some set of common understandings, some level of norms of trust and civility, and some capacity for self-organization. If these basic foundations are not present, the sharing of territory degenerates into the sorts of ethnic conflicts that mark many regions of the world or the hypothetical state of anomie early sociologists attributed to urban life. Numerous studies show that the collective processes of neighborhood life remain fundamental to the realization of shared values and goals, like child socialization and public safety (Sampson 1999). Local places often provide the primarily arena for the kind of face-to-face interactions critical to building trust and common understandings. When they do not, living in these places is likely to be detrimental to health, safety, child development, and the quality of life experienced. Participating in civil society and exercising collective efficacy will be more difficult simply because of absence of propinquity to organized social life.

While local communities are important sites for social capital formation, residents of poor communities are also members of other collectives and communities. Immigrants often remain tied to their countries and villages of origin. Residents of poor communities may also belong to symbolic communities based on race, religion, or some other significant attributes. For example, African Americans share a history, tradition and identity that cuts across local territorial units. In addition, the everyday lives of residents of poor communities sometimes relate them to unions, social clubs, or political organizations that form nonlocal communities of interest, interaction, support, and norm formation. Territorially and politically, poor communities are embedded within larger units, with social ties existing across levels. It would be a mistake to consider the social capital of poor communities to exist entirely within their neighborhood boundaries. At the same time, strong social fabric and organization at the local level can be seen as particularly important and, in some ways, foundational to other forms of collectivity.

Since trust and reciprocity must be enacted within specific relationships and for specific purposes, an individual cannot take "their" social capital with them when they leave those relationships. James Coleman (1990) argued that communities that exhibited closure, where all members knew each other, possessed the most powerful form of social capital. In his empirical study of private and public schools, Coleman (1987) claimed that Catholic schools did a better job of educating inner city children because of the tight connections and shared norms that existed between parents, teachers and students in the school community. Any child in such a school-community benefits from the collective's social capital, even if his or her own parent is not particularly involved. Moreover, a child who leaves that school cannot take the school's social capital to a new school. Ties back to the old school may continue to play some role in the child's life. But, fundamentally, the benefit of the original school's social capital to the child comes from its nature as a public good in that school, not as an individual asset of the child.

Examples of the positive benefits of social capital in poor communities illustrate the collective nature of social assets. Dense community networks in immigrant enclaves help provide the start-up capital, business connections and labor force that have spurred small business growth (Zhou 1992; Light and Bonancich 1988; Sanders and Nee 1996). Microenterprise programs that work to build community social fabric and develop the broader capacities of residents generate economic development and broader community health (Servon 1998). Tenant participation in the social life and building management of low income housing leads better housing maintenance, lower crime rates and broader gains for residents in economic advancement and civic participation. Cooperative ownership of low income housing particularly promotes high levels of social capital, although it is vulnerable to the dilemmas of maintaining a commons (Saegert and Winkel 1998).

We regard social capital as inherently the property of a group or a network, even in cases where it is measured at the individual level and used to predict individual level outcomes (for example, Boisjoy, Duncan and Hofferth 1995). The measurement of social capital at the individual level has led to some conceptual confusion. If an individual's perceptions of trust and cooperation, or expectations that the other would respond helpfully to a request for assistance, are not anchored in actual relationships, they do not constitute social capital. Decisions to measure social capital at the individual level usually result from the limitations of existing data bases, rather than some alternative conception of social capital. We usually have data about individuals, and not about the relevant collectivities. The proper unit of measurement in studies of social capital should be the collective involved in bringing about the outcome. Multi-level statistical models can discriminate between the level of social capital within the group and the differences among individuals that derive from their different levels of involvement, power and centrality. Indeed, what we need is multi-level studies that measure social capital at the level of the collective, while taking into account individual characteristics (Saegert and Winkel 1996; Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls 1997).

Conceiving of social capital as a collective asset does not deny that it is ultimately individual people who constitute communities and who "use" social capital in collective action. The relationship between the individual and the community is complex. We cannot reduce our discussion to just one side of the dialectic. Nevertheless, we want to stress that humans are complexly constituted through their social relationships. We postulate the freedom and agency of individuals to act. But actions always take place within a pre-existing socially and physically constituted world. Modes of action, from linguistically mediated thought to conversation, revolution, or even becoming a hermit, arise from and are negotiated in a social and physical context.

Many authors (e.g. Putnam 1993) have commented on the virtuous or vicious cycles that perpetuate or undermine social capital. The positive or negative effect that an individual's socially situated actions have on others in the community get reflected in the amount of social capital the community has at a later time. Even more fundamentally than financial capital, social capital or its deficit pass from one generation to the next. As with the inheritance of money or property, the process of inheritance is socially constituted, while the inheritance itself constitutes the fortunes of individuals. How all forms of capital are transmitted and the consequences of these routes must be a major area of investigation if we are to understand, and hopefully reverse, the unequal patterns in the accumulation of financial and human capital.

At a most basic level, the physical and psychological existence and health of humans depends at every age on social relationships of trust and reciprocity. Durkheim's classic study of suicide provides an early empirical example of the link between social integration and existence. Epidemiological studies in different communities have shown that people with strong social support networks are less likely to die from all causes than those who are more isolated, controlling for all relevant factors (Kawachi, Kennedy and Lochner 1997). More recently, studies have suggested that American states with higher levels of social trust have lower average mortality rates. State level measures of social trust and group membership correlate highly with income inequality. States with more equal income distribution have lower mortality rates (Kawachi, Kennedy and Lochner 1997). Studies of child abuse have shown that, after controlling for the characteristics of parents and communities often associated with abuse, parents who are socially isolated and those who reside in neighborhoods with little social cohesion more often abuse and maltreat their children, (Lumber & Nation, 1998). Abused children more often grow up to be social isolates and abusers (Trickett & Schellenbach, 1998).

Meanwhile, neighborhoods with high levels of collective efficacy, that is, social cohesion among neighbors combined with a willingness to intervene for the common good, demonstrate lower homicide rates (Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls 1997). And, as Sampson argued elsewhere (1999), crime can destabilize neighborhoods, creating turn over and fear of neighbors that inhibits the development of social capital. Low income housing that is cooperatively owned and that sustains high levels of social capital demonstrate better housing environments, lower crime rates and broader gains for residents in economic advancement and civic participation (Saegert and Winkel 1998). Cooperative ownership also stems residential turn over, thus contributing to the buildings' future potential for social capital.

If we appreciate the importance of a community's "bonding" social capital, we must strive for a balanced assessment of the current stock of social capital in poor communities. In order to build more social capital, we must understand what has already been created and sustained, as well as the effectiveness of those forms for combating poverty. Our starting point for that investigation must question the commonly held, but misleading, idea that poor communities have a particular social capital "deficit" compared to more affluent communities.

Several scholarly studies have been interpreted to mean that poor communities, at least in the inner city, suffer from a social capital deficit compared to more affluent communities. Wilson (1996) argued that the decline of manufacturing jobs combined with the exodus of the middle class from inner city neighborhoods, has created neighborhoods of concentrated poverty with high rates of unemployment. In these circumstances, Wilson suggested, small businesses and social institutions decline, leading to a condition he characterizes as social isolation. Meanwhile, youth lack ties to job networks, as well as to a stable community where good work habits are instilled as the norm. The Committee for Economic Development (1995) argued that distressed inner city communities, which display multiple social problems that reinforce and intensify each other, have experienced a collapse in the ability to cope with problems. The social capital deficit undermines any attempt to solve particular problems in distressed neighborhoods. Other studies have also documented the decline of the rich social fabric and mutual support networks that used to characterize poor, black communities (Drake and Cayton 1945; Ehrenhalt 1995). Anderson (1992) shows how "old heads," older African American men with stable jobs, used to help young black males grow to adulthood, accept social responsibility and get jobs. With the rise of crime and drug abuse, these old heads are now too afraid to intervene with youth, and often lack the necessary job connections to give them legitimacy as well.

Although these authors make a compelling case that social capital has declined in the inner city, there is no systematic evidence to show that the decline is greater than in more affluent communities. Robert Putnam (1995) has argued that social capital has declined in all American communities. He presents no evidence that the decline has been concentrated in the inner city. Meanwhile, studies of affluent suburbs show that the social fabric of many of these communities suffer from privatized and atomized lives.

What more affluent communities do have is greater financial and human capital resources, and stronger public institutions like schools. Their social capital can be more effective because it is reinforced by these other resources. Residents of poor communities may be friends with their neighbors, but those neighbors cannot provide them with connections and references to jobs in the way that many residents of affluent communities can. PTA members in an affluent community can discuss the latest curriculum innovations with school teachers, while PTA members in an inner city school discuss how to get an unresponsive central bureaucracy to fix the ceiling that has been falling down in the school auditorium for the last ten years.

Although we can recognize a decline in social capital in poor communities, that is different from arguing they face a special deficit compared to more affluent communities. The reform of social welfare provision in the recent period has been characterized by a moral deficit argument, that poor people lack the proper work ethic and responsibility for their children. We must be careful not to replace the moral deficit argument with a social deficit argument. That is, if poor communities would just get their social capital "act together", to be just like middle class communities, then the problems of poverty could be solved.

Empirical studies of social capital in poor communities paint a more complex picture. First, poor people have historically relied upon their social capital to aid in survival when other forms of capital have been lacking (Stack 1974; Edin and Lein 1997). More than the affluent, poor people often rely on social relationships for assistance and have networks of relationships in which access to aid is relatively prevalent (Boisjoy, Duncan, & Hofferth, 1995; Stack, 1974). Second, racial divisions as much as poverty isolate people within neighborhoods and from others of different races (as reviewed in Briggs, 1998). Consequently, any "lack" of social capital in poor communities of color may have as much to do with the attitudes and practices of white affluent communities towards them, as it can be attributed to weak internal practices within poor communities. Third, studies that link social capital to important outcomes like crime and child abuse statistically control for poverty and race. These studies find that there is sufficient variation within poor and minority communities in social capital to account for numerous outcomes (c.f. Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, 1997). Finally, several studies show that when residents of poor minority neighborhoods perceive that their collective actions can be effective, they become more socially and civically engaged (Bobo & Gilliam, Jr., 1990; Saegert & Winkel, 1996). In other words, if parents felt the school bureaucracy was likely to fix the ceiling in their children's school through their intervention, they would be likely to get involved in PTA activity.

While we do face the task of building social capital within poor communities as a fundamental part of the process of community revitalization, our starting point should be an analysis of the operations of the social institutions that do exist, and have managed to sustain themselves despite adverse conditions. We need to identify and examine the social institutions that play the most important roles in building social capital within a community, and in using it for anti-poverty efforts. We know that churches, for example, play a particularly important role in encouraging and structuring civic and political participation. For example, while people with higher education and income tend to vote at higher rates, church membership represents one of the most important equalizing forces. Religious institutions play a particularly important role in equalizing political participation because they are sites where people of color (especially African Americans) and low-income people have the opportunity to learn skills that can be translated to politics, skills like letter writing, speech making, and how to plan and make decisions in meetings (Verba et al 1995). More broadly, the black church has supplied the social networks, leadership and motivation central to efforts to mobilize African Americans for community renewal and political empowerment (Harris 1994).

At the same time, any social institution comes with its limitations. Churches exclude the non-believers, have historically limited the leadership roles of women, and find it difficult to address community needs when they conflict with traditional church teaching. We need an assessment of the institutions critical to building and using social capital within communities that considers both their contributions and their limitations.

Social capital building initiatives need to be as inclusive as possible, in participation and leadership. While these participatory relationships should be as broad as possible, they will never be universal. People have different interests and a multiplicity of identities and shared beliefs. James Coleman (1990) emphasized that social capital is more productive to the extent that it exhibits "closure," that is to the extent that all members of a network are closely tied to each other. The flip side of closure is an inevitable degree of exclusion. Nevertheless, an important question is the extent to which social capital based initiatives respect diversity and seek to build as broad a consensus as possible.
We also need to understand the institutional mechanisms through which the tasks of community building and collective action can be pursued. How can community residents develop their leadership capacities? How can institutions develop broader bases of support for their efforts within the community and achieve a measure of accountability? Who are the types of people within these institutions who play key roles in these processes? These are the kinds of questions we must address if we want to understand how to build and use "bonding" social capital to combat poverty.

BRIDGING SOCIAL CAPITAL ACROSS COMMUNITIES

Poor communities cannot address the problems of poverty simply by building social capital within themselves. Strong local institutions provide a foundation for binding individuals together and directing them towards the pursuit of collective needs and aspirations. But strong communities can be closed, limited, hostile to others, possibly even corrupt (Portes 1998). The strong internal social capital of some immigrants group have served as a basis for economic development, by sharing limited resources and pooling labor. But, when some of the more successful business people want to expand beyond the immigrant community, doing business with and hiring nonimmigrants, the normative demands of the community often hold them back (Zhou 1992). Moreover, white ethnic Americans relied upon the strong social capital of their urban communities centered around the Catholic parish to block attempts by African Americans to integrate their neighborhoods (McGreevy 1996). By itself, strong bonding social capital does not overcome the social isolation faced by poor communities. Bridging ties will bring resources and opportunities into poor communities, and provide the basis for strengthening the social fabric of the national society, thereby creating a national consensus for combating poverty. To be effective, then, community revitalization efforts must balance the "bonding" social organizations they build with "bridging" ties to other communities.

Although the issue of bridging social capital has been discussed primarily in relation to the connection between poor and affluent communities, there are actually three types of bridging ties, each important in their own right. First of all, within a poor community itself, we need to consider bridging across different forms of social capital. As we noted above, even a small geographically defined community has many different institutions and networks within it. We cannot assume that one form, e.g. a church community, can speak for the whole. Moreover, different community institutions often do not cooperate with each other, and can sometimes be in open conflict. In order to expand the basis of support for community initiatives, and to broaden the distribution of its benefits, we need to consider ways to build new and cooperative connections across local institutions, for example, across churches, between churches and PTAs, among churches, tenant associations and a local community development corporation.

The second type of bridging connection needs to occur between and among different low-income communities or neighborhoods. It cannot be assumed that poor communities will cooperate with each other in the development and pursuit of initiatives of mutual benefit. In fact, neighborhoods are often divided against each other, for complex historical reasons often related to different interests and identities. These divisions are particularly acute when they fall along racial or ethnic lines, and can often lead to neighborhoods and racially defined communities competing with each other for limited public resources or economic opportunities.

The final type of bridging is the most commonly discussed, although seldom practiced: forging connections between the poor and more affluent communities. Scholars have explored the importance of bridging ties for the socio-economic advancement of individuals and families, for "getting ahead" rather than just "getting by" (Briggs 1998). At the community level, bridging social capital can help build allies for strategies to combat poverty. Moreover, cooperative relationships across communities cultivate a sense of common identity that can sustain a national commitment to alleviate poverty.

In order to forge bridging connections, social asset-based strategies will have to confront the sources of divisions between communities. The sharpest division falls, of course, along racial lines. As a result of historic racism, sustained by patterns of racial and class segregation, the poor and the affluent lack few meaningful connections. These connections have proved difficult to build even when poor people have been moved to more affluent neighborhoods (Briggs 1998). Networks and norms in richer, more powerful, communities often function to exclude poor communities from relationships of mutual trust and responsibility with powerful others and to frustrate the use of social capital to leverage results. Stack's (1996) study of African American return migrants to the South illustrates how white elites blocked the organized efforts of African Americans to provide such basic necessities as child care for working parents and prevented their access to the circle of decision makers in these towns and regions.

But the issue of racial and ethnic divisions affects all types of bridging. Building cooperative relationships between African American and Latino communities has often proved difficult, as has relations between African Americans and Asian Americans. And there are complicated patterns of relationships among different Latino communities, different Asian communities, and different black communities as well. Large scale immigration has resulted in significant and growing communities of a large variety of racial and ethnic groups in many of our nation's biggest cities.

Coalition building has been the primary way that cooperative relationships have been pursued. Coalitions bring institutional representatives, and sometimes a set of activists, together to pursue a common issue or to work for the election of candidates. Coalitions do create ties among the official leaders of different associations and institutions, usually based on the establishment of common interest. These leaders can build the kind of trust likely to promote future cooperation. But coalitions seldom provide a venue for building relationships involving the broader members of those institutions (Warren 1998b). Interest-based coalitions have proven unstable, and have had particular difficulty in establishing and sustaining cooperation across racial lines on the basis of full equality. Many white Americans appear to resist seeing their interests in common with African Americans, or refuse to make the necessary concessions to establish a fair and just agenda.

The social capital perspective suggests the gains to be made by reaching deeper into the fabric of community life, to link a much broader group of residents across communities. If, as the social capital thesis suggests, trust and practical cooperation sustain each other, then we need to find ways for community residents broadly to work together across the lines that divide them. Such cooperation may help develop a sense of common understanding and purpose that can temper conflicts of interest, and even help members come to see a common interest together (Warren 1998a).

The experiences of the civil rights and women's suffrage movements show that political participation can both follow from social capital and translate into the redefinition of collectives. In the contemporary period, we lack a sufficient empirical basis to test this social capital hypothesis, that cooperation based upon commitments to community can overcome racial and class divisions, because there are so few attempts to create bridging ties that reach deeply across communities. The metropolitics strategy, for example, seeks to build interest based coalitions between institutional leaders from urban and inner ring suburban political districts (Orfield 1997). There are some attempts to create a broader social infrastructure for the metropolitics agenda in some cities, drawing upon the participation of members of churches connected to the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing network for example. These attempts hold out some important promise to fuse an interest-based agenda with community-wide cooperation, but remain too young to fully evaluate.

We should not think of building bridging social capital as a way to dissolve conflicts of interest entirely, but more as a way to temper and redefine them as an on-going process. If conflicts of interest will persist, and new ones emerge, then one important criteria for assessing our bridging forms of social capital is the extent to which they accept controversy and difference of opinion as legitimate. Issues of controversy and conflict are largely ignored in discussions of social capital, but are important in the field of community development and the literature on community organizations. Flora, Sharp, Flora and Newlon (1997) examined the relationship between a community's potential for mobilization of social capital and it success in economic development. They included measures of the ability of the community to accept controversy along with measures of the diversity and complexity of social networks, and their ability to mobilize resources from diverse sources. The authors found that all three factors contributed to economic development activity.

Since bridging social capital is needed among institutions within poor communities, across poor communities, and to more affluent communities, the test of a willingness to accept controversy as part of the pursuit of unified goals must be applied at all levels. Poor communities can be chauvinistic, and that will undercut their ability to work together. But, since the poor are the most excluded and marginalized, the responsibility for openness to controversy falls squarely on the more affluent and powerful as well. Poor communities are the ones that most need to remake the boundaries of the collectives they inhabit to include access to greater resources and influence. For poor communities to achieve social capital that leverages social resources, the larger social and territorial community must have norms of trust and mutual responsibility that permit conflict to aid in productive resolutions. The task of creating bridging social capital therefore falls upon both poor communities and the more affluent. A joint response is necessary in order to reduce the material poverty of poor communities as well as the more general decline and fracturing of the social capital that characterizes the nation.

CREATING SYNERGY WITH FINANCIAL AND PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

Although poor communities may not suffer from a particular deficit of social capital, their social assets may be ineffective because they are isolated from, or undermined by, mainstream economic and political institutions. Poor communities cannot be expected to solve their problems on their own, even if they have built strong and deep alliances with other communities in civil society. Strategies to build and use social capital must strive to make constructive connections with the financial and political institutions that play a critical role in community well-being. Scholars studying the role of social capital in developing countries have used the term synergy to characterize the situation where local organizations, economic actors, and state institutions work together for positive developmental outcomes (Evans 1997; Woolcock 1998). Translating that concept to the American context, the goal is to create synergy among community based action, economic organizations and public institutions. Synergy demands the creation of constructive connections, a form of social capital, between organized residents of poor communities and the officials and staff of public and private institutions.

Our perspective differs from those who see social capital, or the civil society sphere, existing independently, even a priori to, economic and political institutions. The voluntary sector appears in that view as the "core" of society, and voluntary action is to be preferred to government provision. Yet, there is considerable evidence that the civil sector is closely tied to government, and economic, action. In order to counter the claims of some conservatives (e.g. Schambra 1994) that there is a zero sum relationship between government and voluntary civic action, Skocpol (1996) has shown the reciprocal relationship between many important federal government programs and civic associations, like the American Legion. Government policy, in fact, can help build social capital by encouraging the formation of associations like the PTAs. McCarthy and Castelli (n.d.) have shown how the "independent," charitable sector is intimately tied to the public sector, through funding and regulatory structures.

There is ample evidence that global economic processes and government policies have served to weaken the social fabric of inner city neighborhoods (Wilson 1996). The flight of jobs destroys businesses, social institutions and youth socialization processes. Public housing policies often concentrated the most poor in anti-social physical structures and prevented family networks from living together. In fact, many of the same forces that have helped affluent suburbs grow have served to undermine the social fabric of poor communities. The federal government subsidizes housing development in the suburbs through its mortgage tax deduction, while providing far fewer funds to build affordable housing needed in the inner city.

Just as important as the quantity of the stock of social capital, however, is its effectiveness. Poor communities suffer from social, economic and political isolation, typically following along racial lines, that render the social assets they do have ineffective. Some have taken Wilson's (1987) notion of social isolation to mean that poor communities are entirely cut off from mainstream society. In reality, poor people have many connections to public and private institutions, like schools, health care providers, social service agencies, the police, housing authorities, business franchises, churches and the media. Racial and economic segregation may well mean that the poor lack meaningful social connections to affluent communities. But they are enmeshed in a multifaceted web of connections to mainstream institutions.

"Connections," however, are not sufficient. The question is whether these connections are cooperative in nature or not. In other words, the appearance of a social connection does not tell us the nature of it. It could be one of domination/submission or one of mutual cooperation. Moreover, it may be a latent tie that is not actualized. For social capital to "work," people must have access to a web of trusting social relationships that are activated. This question is particularly important to understanding the relationship between public institutions and residents of poor communities.

Some institutions may encourage the formation of social capital, civic participation and the amelioration of poverty. But, in general, many public institutions are located in the inner city, but are not "of" those communities in any meaningful sense. They lack common understandings and cooperative relationships with indigenous traditions and leaders. Public school teachers often have no idea of the conditions of life of their students (Shirley 1997), and many even resist trying to find out by making connections to the school's neighborhood (Noguera 1995). Police, rather than working with community residents to improve public safety, are often seen as alien forces of social control and oppression, particularly in poor, African American communities. Residents of poor communities often see public agencies, in general, as unresponsive and unaccountable to them. Racism and racial differences between white staff persons of public agencies and the residents of color they serve often appears central to the division. Most public school teachers in communities of color are white, and see themselves teaching "other people's children," as Lisa Delpit (1995) so aptly put it.

There are a number of ways that dominant institutions can and have undermined the social capital of poor communities or rendered it ineffective. First, they can make rules or institute practices (particularly nonresponsiveness) that create community instability or disrupt social ties. Nonresponsiveness works to undermine collective efficacy because it renders that activity useless. One of the elemental lessons of efforts to organize in any community is that victories are needed to sustain and build collective action. If institutions refuse to respond, or delay ad infinitum, activists will become discouraged and support will wither. Latent social capital may continue to exist; but it will even more difficult to use that capital to attempt to improve conditions in the future.

For example, public housing authorities may mandate tenant associations in housing developments. But their practices in relating to these associations can often render them not only ineffective but destructive of social organization. If housing authorities fail to deliver requested improvements by tenant leaders, the leaders' credibility is undermined and people learn to view efforts at collective organization as a waste of time. When authorities retaliate by denying programs and services to developments with active tenants associations, the effect is even more devastating for the development of social capital. Community development corporations may similarly undermine resident social capital by supporting the organization of neighborhood residents, but then excluding them from decisions that may displace the residents or bring in neighbors they consider undesirable (Saegert, in press).

Second, public institutions can adopt practices that prevent communication or make it one-sided. They can provide information that demeans, demoralizes, or disappears the recipient poor community and\or fails to provide information that is substantively useful to understanding community conditions. Geographic, bureaucratic and technological buffers can prevent direct contact with poor communities. Even when government or nonprofit agencies attempt to bring poor neighborhood residents into planning and decision making processes, different norms for communication and the formal structure of meetings can silence residents or lead professionals in charge to disregard their input (Briggs 1998).

Third, mainstream institutions can isolate poor communities by creating a public image that vilifies them. For example, public housing tenants have been systematically portrayed in the media and in more scholarly publications as humanly as well as financially destitute, destined for lives of unemployment, disfunction, and crime (Kotlowitz 1991; Rainwater 1970; Reingold 1997). People who have committed a crime have been portrayed as morally and socially deficient, deserving no compassion or understanding for some of the conditions that may have contributed to their criminal action. A number of states have so demeaned people who commit crimes that they are permanently denied the right to vote when convicted of a felony. Thirteen percent of all African American men are disenfranchised in this way; in Florida, almost one third of black men have permanently lost the right to vote (The Sentencing Project 1998).

Finally, public institutions can actively work to crush autonomy and the collective action of individuals and groups in poor communities. The last period of widespread community action in America's inner cities occurred in the sixties. But many of these initiatives met with opposition and repression. The effort to establish community control of schools in New York City faced strong opposition from the largely white teacher's union and ultimately failed (Berube and Gittell 1969; Ture and Hamilton 1992). Meanwhile, local police and the FBI worked to disrupt and repress more militant organizations in the black community, like the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers espoused revolutionary goals, but also organized breakfast programs for poor children.

Combating poverty and its effects, then, requires not just building social capital in poor communities, but using it to establish effective, cooperative relationships with mainstream institutions. For example, we need to search for ways to connect public schools with parents and community residents in a cooperative process to improve schools and rebuild communities (Noguera 1996). Economic development requires cooperative relationships with financial, as well as public, institutions. Community development corporations have had much success in bringing in resources from governments and financial institutions to build affordable housing, but we may still need to search for ways in which indigenous community residents can participate and control these development oriented institutions (Stoecker 1997).

Scholars in development studies have used the term synergy to describe when a community's social assets are working in unison with government action. Successful development appears to occur best when government and local community networks and organizations cooperate, rather than when governments repress local initiative. Peter Evans (1997) distinguishes a weak and strong version of synergy. The weak version, complimentarity, fits well with standard notions of neoclassical economics and public administration. Governments supply the necessary framework, like the rule of law, for private action and deliver collective goods that compliment the inputs of private actors. But the social capital framework suggests a stronger version, that of embeddedness. Here, public officials share social ties and trust with community residents, across the public/private divide. They are embedded in the community. When public officials work to establish cooperative ties and efforts, they are able to "coproduce" the desired outcome, whether it is economic development, improved public health, or the education of children (Evans 1997; Ostrom 1997; Tendler 1997).

Public institutions in the United States are more likely to be embedded in more affluent communities than those in poor communities. Teachers and police officers, for example, live in the more affluent areas they serve. Or, even if they do not, they are more likely to be part of similar, historically developed communities, that is, by race, education and class. These shared identities, interests, perspectives allow public officials and community residents to work in tandem with each other. Public institutions do not simply deliver an efficient public service according to professional standards. In fact, if we look below the surface, we can see the myriad ways in which effective public institutions are embedded in the communities they serve.

In poor communities, as we have discussed, there is often a divide between public officials and the residents they serve, reinforced by historic divisions of race and class. Public agencies do not see community residents as responsible actors for improving their communities. The idea of coproduction can provide a framework for building ties and trust between public employees and residents. For example, if both school teachers and parents saw their task as coproducing education and youth development, they would have a firm foundation for at least attempting to build cooperative relationships.

There is, of course, a danger to embeddedness, that is, to close ties between public officials and local communities. These ties can become corrupt, serve the interests of a narrow group, and/or lead to nepotism. Public schools, for example, can hire less qualified, but well connected, teachers, give contracts for building work out to the members of the ethnic civic association that help elect fellow ethnic school board members, and direct public funds disproportionately to the schools in the neighborhoods where administrators have closer ties.

Synergy, then, needs to be balanced with a degree of autonomy and integrity on the part of public institutions (Woolcock 1998). In addition to being accountable to the local community, public institutions must have accountability to higher public authorities as well as to the standards of their professional communities. Evans (1995) refers to this balance as "embedded autonomy," arguing that successful industrial development occurs where state authorities develop independent and coherent bureaucracies at the same time as they work cooperatively with private economic actors.

While the necessity for a coherent public administration with independent standards of accountability is widely recognized, less appreciated is the need to build such autonomous institutions in the civil society of poor communities. If the social organization of poor communities remains at the level of support and friendship networks, they are in a weak position to form cooperative ties to well established and resource rich public institutions. For example, if we want to establish co-productive relationships between public schools and parents, then parents must attain a sufficient degree of self-organization upon which to enter those relationships on equal terms.

The optimum arrangement lies in the existence of coherent and relatively autonomous organizations in each sector (social, political, economic) which have connections and accountability to each other. Otherwise, any sector, including community organizations, can become corrupt. For example, to keep union pension funds out of the hands of corrupt officials requires strong democracy and accountability within unions, as well as professional accounting practices by financial institutions and legal oversight by governmental agencies. Minorities of various kinds require the legal protection of their rights no less than when majoritarian communities become strong and powerful.

Cooperative initiatives amongst these sectors can come both from the bottom-up and from the top-down. We cannot ignore either direction. From the bottom-up, communities need to develop effective strategies to encourage or compel public or private institutions to cooperate with their initiatives. From the top-down, those institutions themselves can initiate reforms to encourage and collaborate with community-based efforts. To be successful, though, cooperative relationships will have to incorporate both strong community organizations as well as professional public agencies with real accountability to local communities.

The dynamic between community organization and larger institutions affects the development of social capital. There is a continuum of formal/legal arrangements that affect the formation and utilization of social capital. For example, many tenants have no legal basis to influence the management of their apartment buildings. In some places, tenants associations have input into building decisions, but they still lack the formal and legal responsibility for the building that would help encourage and sustain social capital. Co-op owners, on the other hand, do have this legal right and responsibility. Public schools exhibit a continuum as well. In schools where parental involvement is limited to parent-teacher conferences, with a yearly open house, some parents can establish ties with their child's teacher. But parents are not connected to one another. These connections can be built in a PTA. Even here, though, the responsibilities of the traditional PTA are limited to fund-raising and supporting school events. They have quite limited opportunity to influence school policy. School based management, as in many charter schools, provides an opportunity for developing cooperation among parents and with school personnel by assigning real responsibility and authority to parents in school policy. Institutional designs that provide such opportunity do not guarantee participation or cooperation (Bryk et al 1998). But they do establish either constraints or opportunities for social capital formation.

Institutional reform can help encourage the formation of social capital. To be effective, though, that social capital needs to access and deliver greater resources and services to poor communities. We need to identify the intermediate kinds of social organizations and the institutional forms that are needed to link social capital to money, material goods and services, and a supportive physical environment. For example, residents of poor communities have organized buying clubs to help reduce the cost of goods, which are often over-priced in their neighborhoods. But they have difficulty acquiring micro loans to make the initial purchases to get the club started, as commercial banks traditionally will not make these kind of loans.

In sum, we need initiatives that can train residents of poor communities to influence the larger institutions that shape their lives, and eventually to participate in decision-making with them. The institutions themselves need to reform their practices to encourage participation and to be open to the kinds of needs that may be specific to poor communities. Finally, broader changes in policies are needed to create a physical, social and human environment in which disadvantaged people can cooperate and can develop fully their capacities to be public actors.

BUILDING SOCIAL CAPITAL NATIONALLY: TOWARDS SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

While local efforts to build and use social capital provide a strong foundation for addressing the problems of poverty, by themselves they are insufficient. Since the processes that produce poverty and community decline lie within the broader structures of economic inequality, racism and political power in American society, we face the need to link well-rooted local initiatives nationally. If we understand poverty as a relational concept, then we must understand the conditions of poor communities in relationship to other, more affluent, communities and to mainstream society. Throughout this paper, we have been discussing the ways in which mainstream institutions concentrate poverty in poor communities, cause the deterioration of their physical environment, and undermine their social capital.

In the last section, we advocated creating cooperative relationships between local community organizations, public agencies and financial institutions. But many of these institutions operate at a distance, with disastrous consequences for the day to day functioning of individuals, families and organizations. Decisions made by large corporations and government institutions have degraded the environment of poor communities, by, for example, concentrating pollution and toxic waste in those neighborhoods. Meanwhile, inadequate or inaccessible health services mean that poor people suffer from ill health. To take but one dramatic example, Jonathan Kozol (1991) described the conditions of schools in the poor, and largely African American, community of East St. Louis. During the rainy season, schools regularly flood with the toxic waste from the city's chemical plants. Moreover, as a result of inadequate dental care, many children attend school suffering from ear pain. Kozol asked how we can expect children to learn under those conditions. We may ask how we can expect residents of poor communities to build social capital when they are suffering from acute health problems.

Many corporate and government decisions are made at a national, or increasingly international, level. Transforming the operations of these institutions will not be easy. It will require national alliances, and perhaps eventually, international ones as well.

To the extent that poor communities use their social capital to address their problems, they will be lead to confront these structures. Foley and Edwards (1996) have criticized the concept of social capital for a tendency to deny the existence of conflict and power in society. It is true that many theorists of social capital have stressed the benefits of cooperation and had little to say about how to deal with conflicts of interests that are part of any society. Some strategies for community organizing and revitalization reject any overt attempt to build power or confront institutions, seeking to frame all of their work within a consensual framework (Gittell and Vidal 1998). Community development corporations have been criticized for the lack of any viable strategy to build the social capital of poor communities so that they attain a measure of real power and control over their own development (Stoecker 1997).

A strong case can be made that all Americans have a long-term interest in overcoming poverty and revitalizing poor communities (CED 1996). But, in the short run, many affluent Americans derive a benefit from economic inequality. To cite but one example, middle and upper middle class homeowners receive a huge federal government "subsidy" through the deduction they take on their income taxes for mortgage interest and local property taxes, while the government spends far less on affordable housing. What if residents of poor communities, using their social assets, demanded a reversal of this policy? Moreover, officials in government agencies, as well as corporate officials, often have a vested interest in policies and modes of operation that exclude the poor. A school principal, while perhaps having a long term interest in the improvement of schooling that can come through parental involvement, may resist becoming accountable to an organized group of parents.

As students of social movements understand, power is an element of any process of social change that involves collective action. Pursuing a utopian goal of eliminating power conflicts has often led to disaster. On the other hand, recognizing the realities of conflict and power rooted in institutional structures, however, does not mean that differences are irreconcilable. We need to search for strategies that use confrontation when necessary, but that are able to establish new forms of cooperation as their ultimate result.

It is useful to consider power here not just as the power "over" others, but as the power "to" act together. This kind of power can be transformative, creating new forms of cooperation and new solutions to the problems related to poverty. Power, in this view, is connected to responsibility, and therefore to the fundamental idea of social capital as the resources that contribute to cooperative action. From this standpoint, we can conceive of building social assets as a way to empower, that is, to expand the capacities of poor communities to act to combat poverty, and to win over new allies.

The primary force for broader institutional transformation will likely come from poor communities themselves. A social asset building approach, in fact, may be the most promising strategy for generating the power necessary to demand such change. Social capital provides an important foundation to such strategies because it is through social relationships that individuals are constituted in their capacity to act in public life. Mediating institutions like families, schools and congregations develop in each individual the capacity, that is, the understanding, skills, and knowledge for personal autonomy, a sense of moral justice, and efficacy. That is, people develop many of the traits assume by liberal theory only by their embeddedness in a vibrant civil society.

Political economists have made a powerful case that greater resources to poor communities provide the necessary foundation for any strategy to combat poverty. Without jobs and economic development, without greater resources in public schools and housing, social capital building is meaningless. A social asset building perspective does not so much reject that argument as to turn it on its head. We want to know how communities can use their social assets to bring these resources to their communities, because they are unlikely to come short of an organized demand for them. Nevertheless, the political economy challenge is important, because it demands that any strategy to combat poverty cannot be content with small or local victories, the kind that has characterized the community building movement so far. These initiatives represent important beginnings and concrete improvements to families and communities. But we must search for ways to expand the capacities of poor communities, to forge sufficient allies, to act nationally to redress the structures of economic inequality and political power that create poverty in America.

Efforts to build and use social capital in poor communities can contribute to a broader transformation of American civic and political life as well. Although not alone, community revitalization initiatives have been at the forefront of developing ways to rebuild the social fabric of American communities and rejuvenate democratic participation as well. Historically, social movements of the poor and excluded have been some of the most important forces for democratic change in America. The contemporary period holds out the potential for broader transformation as well.

One important form of transformation lies in gender roles. Community building has historically been women's work, and women still predominate today. If poor communities are going to develop effective power in the public realm, than the roles of women as community leaders must be fully developed and appreciated. Conversely, if the country is going to take community building seriously, and to search for a greater sense of common purpose with which to temper the clash of interests that dominate in the political realm, it needs to take seriously the strategies and approaches women have developed. These strategies are diverse, but place a priority on relationship-building, on holistic approaches that integrate public and private spheres, and on strengthening families and communities (Naples 1998; Stoecker and Stall 1998)

A second arena of transformation lies in addressing racism and structures of racial equality. On the one hand, developing effective strategies to combat poverty requires confronting structures of racial inequality because they constitute a fundamental aspect of the generation of concentrated poverty in communities of color (Massey and Denton 1993; Sampson 1999). Moreover, as we discussed above, racialized perceptions of interests, identities and communities undermine efforts to develop the kind of bridging social capital and sense of common purpose necessary to combat poverty. On the other hand, American civic and political life can learn from the community building traditions in its communities of color. Although public attention is usually drawn to the problems of poor black communities, African Americans, despite adverse conditions, maintain some of the strongest forms of social capital in the country. For example, African Americans have the highest rates of church membership and participation. Rather than being inwardly focused, black churches are some of the most involved in providing services and support to the broad community, and in serving as a basis for economic development and political participation (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). African Americans also demonstrate a broad commitment to the whole community, demonstrated by consistent support for the public provision of a broad range of social services.

Building social capital at the local level is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of a strategy for social transformation. Effective strategies will be necessary to generate power and change at the national level. Community does not just occur at the local level, and can not be limited there. Nevertheless, one of the key contributions of the concept of social capital is an understanding that cooperation does find a foundation in the face to face interactions, and in the socializing institutions, that operate at the local level. Many of the advocacy groups for the poor, or for other causes, remain weak because they lack deep local, participatory roots (Walker 1991; Weir and Ganz 1997). Strategies to combat poverty, then, need to address how to build social capital locally, but connect it regionally and nationally.

Currently, most community building efforts with strong local roots lack much national coherence (Stoecker 1997; Dreier 1996). There have been efforts undertaken by various community building initiatives to move beyond the neighborhood level. Intermediaries in the community development movement have worked to create greater coordination of efforts at urban, state and national levels (Vidal 1992). Some local affiliates of community organizing networks undertake unified campaigns at the state level, and coordinate efforts regionally -- like the Industrial Areas Foundation network in Texas and the Southwest (Warren 1998b). We have a pressing need to evaluate the emerging strategies and institutional forms that link efforts to build and use social capital together, both within and among networks. Moreover, we need to investigate the extent to which emerging initiatives at the national level create pressure for fundamental transformation in the institutional processes that create poverty in America.

CRITERIA FOR SOCIAL ASSET BUILDING INITIATIVES

We are entering a period of widespread experimentation with community based approaches to poverty and development more generally. New initiatives are emerging at many levels, among churches, community networks, social service providers, foundations, and government at local, state and federal levels. Almost every initiative incorporates community participation in some way into its perspective, even if the practical reality falls short. Moreover, most recognize as goals strengthening the social fabric of communities and fostering individual autonomy and responsibility.

While there are accepted measures for building financial and human assets, we lack clear criteria for identifying initiatives that show promise in building and using social capital to combat poverty. Yet supporting and encouraging successful experiments, and promoting their spread to new areas, can be crucial to the broader success of this approach. Moreover, we need to specify the weaknesses among such interventions in order to spur efforts to strengthen this emerging movement.

The following criteria are drawn from the framework discussed in this paper. These are not the only questions that can be asked about anti-poverty strategies. But they do highlight the issues critical to advancing the social capital of poor communities. As scholars, policy makers, and community activists work to develop a set of criteria, we can advance our efforts to construct useful measures for each of them.

For each category, we are interested in evaluating different forms of social capital and different strategies for using it to combat poverty. Some of these forms are informal, like support networks and friendship and family groups. These are often locally based, but can link people at urban and national levels as well. But we concentrate most of our attention on more formal organizations, as well as on the nature of the public spaces that structure community interaction.

1. Within Community: Bonding Social Capital

Different types of organizations at this level include churches, tenant or homeowner associations, schools and PTAs, community development corporations, affiliates of community organizing networks, food coops, credit unions, small businesses and their associations, gangs, cultural and arts organizations, and fraternal orders. Key public spaces include housing environments, playgrounds, shopping centers, and community centers. We need to investigate the extent to which, and the processes through which, initiatives to build and use social capital:

• build and sustain institutions that integrate individuals and families
• draw upon indigenous community traditions, but innovate as well
• demonstrate inclusiveness in participation and leadership
• achieve accountability to the broader community
• distribute benefits broadly within the community
• develop programs that both sustain families and improve communities

Important institutional forms here include church denominations and ecumenical networks, school systems, PTAs, unions, trade associations, some advocacy groups, some community organizing networks, and community development associations. Public spaces here can be important too, including central business districts, city halls, centrally located parks, theaters and sports facilities. We need to investigate the extent to which, and the processes through which, initiatives to build and use social capital at this level:

• develop cooperative relationships among institutions within poor communities
• build relationships across poor communities to support unified efforts
• build cooperative ties with more affluent communities
• bring broader resources into poor communities
• create new identities and understandings of common interests and community

3. From Communities to Public and Financial Institutions: Synergistic Connections

Some important institutional forms here include political parties and elected officials, community development corporations, franchise businesses, unions, community/labor coalitions, some advocacy groups, various partnership bodies (for job training, community schools, economic development). Criteria in building social capital at this level include the extent to which initiatives:

• promote understanding and cooperation between residents and public/financial institutions
• work to make public institutions accountable to the community
• manage conflict and consensus building in an effective manner
• promote innovation in both bottom up and top down strategies
• create new public policies that directly support and expand community building

4. Nationally: Towards Social Transformation

We have fewer institutional forms at this level that have a solid base in organized communities. But some examples might include churches, unions, coalitions, some advocacy groups, and training centers for community and other forms of organizing. We need to investigate the extent to which, and the processes through which, initiatives to build and use social capital at this level:

• influence the ways institutions function on an ongoing basis
• create a measure of autonomous control for poor communities, so they can propose and implement alternatives to the plans, programs, and activities of dominant institutions and intervening agents
• work to overcome racism and structures of racial inequality
• promote leadership by women and the contributions of women to new ways of conducting civil and political life
• develop sufficient power to transform broader structures that cause and sustain poverty

Although we can develop criteria for social capital building initiatives at each level, we have tried to be sensitive in our framework to the relationships between levels. In particular, activities at higher levels assume and rely upon coherence and support at the "within community," foundational level. Incoherence at the first level almost always leads to misrepresentation and resentment at other levels. For example, public housing residents are often unorganized. When well-meaning advocates attempt to represent tenant interests in housing improvements, the residents are often dissatisfied with their representation. But there was no tenant association to which advocates could be accountable. Some trade unions would like to work with poor communities, but often there is no organization that represents community residents. When banks, under pressure to comply with community reinvestment act provisions, decide to loan to low-income neighborhoods, they search for knowledgeable and legitimate community organizations with which to partner.

Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to build effective and competent organizations within communities without the support of organizations at higher levels. Unfortunately, these organizations often create policies and environments that are hostile to local organizing. When neighborhoods represent toxic waste sites, or war zones between rival gangs, how are residents going to build social capital?

Local organization remains fundamental to changing the policies of governments and corporations, but social capital building needs to take place at all levels simultaneously. Our criteria for evaluating social capital building initiatives must also include whether and how initiatives at one level support advancement at other levels. Social capital promises a way to achieve control over large-scale state and corporate institutions, but only to the extent we can make progress at all levels, from the local to the national, and eventually at the global level as well.
 

Endnotes

. Poverty, race, and gender are intertwined in U.S. history, culture, politics, social organization, and economics, which are all human constructs of language, practice, and experience. These are categories we work with because they matter in daily life. We have chosen to view them as organizing themes within every topic rather than as topics in themselves.

. No systematic study of community revitalization efforts currently exists. For a history of neighborhood based initiatives to combat poverty, see Halpern (1995). For an overview of community development corporations, see Vidal (1992). Dreier (1996) presents an overview of community organizing and empowerment initiatives. Discussions of the role of religious institutions in community based development can be found in Scheie et al (1991) and Clemetson and Coates (1992). Schorr (1997) discusses a range of comprehensive neighborhood based initiatives involving partnerships between government, service providers, foundations and community institutions.

. According to James Coleman (1988), "Unlike other forms of capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations between actors and among actors. It is not lodged either in the actors themselves or in physical implements of production." Robert Putnam (1995) defines social capital as "the features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and social trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit."

.We emphasize the concept of place to underscore the fact that social capital always occurs in real time and space and that networks and relationships have a material dimension. People may be related across time and space by travel or E-mail or letters. Even reminiscences or folktales told somewhat similarly and somewhat differently in far flung locations could carry the sense of trusted connections and readiness for cooperative actions that are required for social capital.

. Foley and Edwards (1998) make a related point when they argue that social capital must circulate in order to exist.

. For a summary discussion, see Portes (1995).

. Studying individual level outcomes itself represents a limited perspective on combating poverty. If we want to address the larger processes that create and reproduce poverty, and not just improve the immediate well-being of individuals and communities, then examining the contribution of social capital as a community asset is even more important because communities represent a place where people can act collectively in order to change the policies of public and private institutions.

. On the rise of private associations in suburbs, see McKenzie (1994). Robert Reich (1991) discusses the withdrawal of professional elites from broader public life.

. Roger Waldinger (1997) discusses competition between African Americans and Latinos for jobs in Los Angeles. After Harold Washington's election as mayor of Chicago in 1983, the cooperation between African Americans and Latinos that proved crucial to his election collapsed when Latinos charged that they were not getting their fair share of municipal jobs (Ferman 1996).

. On the nature of multiracial cooperation in electoral coalition building, as well as the generation of trust among community representatives, see the essays in Browning, Marshall and Tabb (1997).

. For a fuller discussion of race and metropolitanism, see Weir (1998).

. The "charitable choice" provision of the recent federal welfare reform reflects this perspective. It liberalized the rules allowing religious institutions to provide publicly funded services to local communities.

. For a related discussion, see Foley and Edwards (1998). The authors stress the context dependency of social capital where "neither attitudes (norms, trust), nor infrastructures (networks, organization), per se can be understood as social capital in isolation from the issue of access." (p. 2)

. "Social capital inheres, not just in civil society, but in an enduring set of relationships that span the public-private divide...it is social capital built in the interstices between state and society that keeps [economic] growth on track." (Evan, 1997: 1122)

. See, for example, Jean Anyon's (1997) discussion of the corruption of the Newark school system.

. A program evaluation literature has begun to address some of these questions; see Connell et al (1995) and Fulbright-Anderson, Kubisch and Connell (1998).
 

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