Social Capital and Poor Communities

Chapter 1: The Role of Social Capital in Combating Poverty

Chapter 1 The Role of Social Capital in Combating Poverty Mark R. Warren, J. Phillip Thompson, and Susan Saegert As the third in a series of books about building assets in poor communities, this volume examines the contributions that social capital can make to combating poverty and fostering the development of poor communities. Social capital refers to the set of resources that inhere in relationships of trust and cooperation between people.1 These kinds of social assets do not alleviate poverty directly; rather, they leverage investments in human capital and household financial resources. Poor people rely on the support of extended family relationships and of more formal organizations like churches to survive. Scholars have long recognized the importance of these community support structures, and in that sense, social capital is not an entirely new notion for understanding the dynamics of poor communities. But recent scholarly work on social capital has served to renew interest in how social organization and norms of cooperation, both within a community and in its relationships to outside institutions, affect its development. In particular, this work has stimulated new thinking about the role that social capital can play not just in helping families survive but in advancing public policy that seeks to combat poverty. Making use of social capital as an analytical construct requires a shift from the individual to the community as the unit of analysis for strategies to combat poverty. Social capital is a collective asset, a feature of communities, rather than the property of an individual. As such, individuals both contribute to it and use it, but they cannot own it.2 Because it is a "common good," social capital plays a particularly important role in ensuring those aspects of personal welfare that the individual alone can rarely provide (for example, security from crime and public health). In the last ten years, evidence has been mounting that social relationships and community action matter for family well-being, even where communities lack many financial resources.3 The chapters in this volume provide a fairly comprehensive assessment of the contributions that social capital can make to combating poverty. They marshal impressive evidence that a community's social assets can improve the health, safety, education, economic well-being, political participation, and quality of life of residents in poor communities. Yet these chapters also demonstrate that strengthening the social capital of poor communities and, just as important, making effective use of those I I Social Capital and Poor Communities assets to foster community well-being are no easy tasks. Important obstacles exist, and social capital rarely works on its own. Nevertheless, social capital matters, and it may be the most promising starting point for new directions in combating poverty. This volume was assembled to foster better understanding of the contributions that social capital can make to combating poverty and of the important obstacles to building and using social capital. With these considerations in mind, the contributors were asked to identify strategies that show promise for developing and using social assets to improve the lives of families in poor communities. Our premise is that, within the constraints of social organization, economics, politics, culture, and history, people can act collectively to change their circumstances. We seek to direct our attention to how this can be done. SOCIAL CAPITAL IN CONTEXT Social capital is not an alternative to providing greater financial resources and public services to poor communities. Rather, it constitutes an essential means to increase such resources and to make more effective use of them. This perspective differs from one that counterposes community self-help to government action. In the self-help view, the problems of poor communities lie in their weak internal organization and social norms. A decline in social capital here represents a collapse in a community's ability to solve its own problems.4 Public support can be seen as a contributor to undermining community responsibility. The answer, then, is to decrease government assistance and instead foster community self-help and private, charitable support. Such thinking, in part, has served as a foundation for the charitable choice provision in recent welfare reform. This provision liberalized the rules allowing religious institutions to provide publicly funded services to local communities so that they could replace direct government provision. Recent social welfare reforms have been premised on the moral deficit argument that poor people lack a proper work ethic and sense of responsibility for their children . Many scholars have criticized this "blaming the victim" approach (for example , Kelley 1997...