Social Capital and Poor Communities

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments The chapters in this volume were originally presented at the conference "Social Capital and Poor Communities: Building and Using Social Assets to Combat Poverty," held in March 1999. The editors would like to thank the Ford Foundation for its sponsorship of the conference as one of a series devoted to combating poverty through asset-building strategies. We benefited from the support and advice of a number of individuals at Ford, including Melvin Oliver, Betsy Campbell, Bernard Wasow, Roland Anglin, and Michael Comoy. We would also like to thank the other cosponsors ofthe conference: the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Fordham University, the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. The discussions at the conference were unusually lively and productive. All participants seemed to feel the urgency of the issues we addressed and were excited about the new possibilities for improving the lives of families and their communities that might corne through building social capitaL The editors and the contributors to this volume, the collective result of the conference, benefited from conversations among each other as well as with panelists and members of the audience. We would particularly like to thank the discussants of the papers: Philip Kasinitz, Michael Dawson, Ashutosh Varshney, Robert Crutchfield, Walter Stafford, Kenneth Jackson, Jennifer Hochschild, Aida Giachello, Victoria Hattam, Frederick Harris, and Sally Covington. We would also like to thank three who served as rapporteurs for the conference: Xavier de Souza Briggs, Angela Blackwell, and Marilyn Gittell. Many people active in the practical work of community building took the time to serve on panels at the conference and share lessons from their work. These included Julie Thomasson of MDe, Inc., in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Monifa Akinwole of the Malcolm XGrassroots Movement; Nancy Biberman from the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation; Lee Farrow from Rheedlen's Community Pride; Aida Giachello of the Midwest Latino Health Research, Training, and Policy Center; Nicholas Freudenberg of Hunter College; Miriam Thompson of the Office of Worker Education at Queens College; and the Reverend Adolphus Lacey from Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, New York. Thoughtful and challenging comments from the diverse group of panelists and audience members at the conference helped emich this book. The excellent organizing work of James Dobson helped make the conference such a success. Finally, we would like to thank Eric Wanner and Suzanne Nichols from the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their assistance in the difficult task of editing conference papers into a coherent volume. We would also like to thank our families who have helped and encouraged us to find new strategies to fight poverty. xvii Acknowledgments This volume is the fruit of an intellectual collaboration among the editors. We should be considered equal coeditors and have listed ourselves alphabetically. We hope this book contributes to our understanding of the causes of poverty and social deprivation. More than that, we hope the volume will help advance the work of policymakers and activists struggling to develop new strategies in community building and development. xviii ...