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"Better Together" |
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It's NOW on New Hampshire Outlook: Are Americans retreating from political and public life? What one author says about bringing folks back to the public square. Plus, the glue that connects the fabric of our society. A conversation with the co-authors of "Better Together." |
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We're broadcasting from the State House in Concord, where voices on all sides of the issues are heard -- and decisions are made regarding the future of New Hampshire. Hello. I'm Beth Carroll. Welcome to New Hampshire Outlook. Public participation, is it a thing of the past? Richard Harwood, founder of the "Harwood Institute for Public Innovation" Maryland, spent 13 years in cities and towns across America talking to people about politics and public life. The author and civic innovator found this country not to be a nation of red and blue states but a nation in full retreat from the public square. While folks are looking for "leaders" they are unwilling to participate themselves. Outlook's Phil Vaughn sat down with Harwood during a visit to Saint Anselm College in Manchester and found out there is hope. |
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Manchester was one stop as Harwood travels the country bringing his message to different cities and towns. |
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A conversation with the co-authors of "Better Together." |
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In an age of eroding social institutions, there ARE leaders who are finding new ways to connect with citizens. That's the message of the book, "Better Together," by Harvard Professor Robert Putnam and Lew Feldstein, who heads the NH Charitable Foundation. Outlook's Richard Ager sat down with them for a conversation in 2003 at Harvard University in Cambridge. They spoke about their findings, and their hopes for constructive social change. |
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Soundup: Better Together tape 1 07:03;48 Social capital and civic engagement is not about just everybody agreeing. It's about everybody getting involved in the debate. Track: Robert Putnam pioneered the study of social capital, creating its vocabulary and describing the dangers posed to our nation by a population becoming alienated from its civic foundations. His analysis and critique first drew widespread acclaim through his book "Bowling Alone" in which he argued that America is losing the social glue that holds it together. Bite: Steve camera 05:18:45 Americans are a joining people and for most of the 20th century, we joined more, we schmoozed more, we voted more, we gave more. And then, mysteriously, suddenly - in the late 60s and early 70s - we started doing all of those things less and all of those lines - for voting, for joining - PTA membership was down, Rotary membership was down, church attendance is down, philanthropy is down. And spending time with your family, having dinner with your own family, and knowing your neighbors. All of those trends reversed in the late 60s and early 70s. And that challenge which is posed by the fact that we're losing our social capital - or at least the traditional forms of social capital are declining - really set the stage for this new book. Track: Putnam wrote "Better Together" with Lew Feldstein, President of the NH Charitable Foundation and a fellow social critic. Soundup: Better together tape 1 07:04:10 "Zip down from Portland to the Rio Grande Valley." Track: The two selected stories from around the nation to illustrate the point that many people are finding new ways to strengthen social bonds including Craigslist, a free internet site based in San Francisco. Bite: Better together tape 1 07:06:28 It's actually now one of the 2-300 top websites in the world. If you go to it, it looks like a place you'd get want ads for jobs and apartments, but if you look behind the scenes, there's a whole lot of community being built there. It's interesting because it's not an alternative purely cyberspace, purely virtual community. It's the use of internet technology to build real face-to-face communities. Bite: Better together tape 1 07:04:38 *** And the next one we move to is - Portsmouth, NH. Track: Perhaps the most unusual story is that of the Shipyard Project. Bite: Better together tape 1 07:04:50 Portsmouth, NH, the home of the nation's oldest shipyard. A shipyard that is now involved almost entirely in repairing nuclear subs. Manned entirely by people who - workers, pipers, fitters, riggers. Some who have followed their fathers and grandfathers into this job. It is a blue-collar conservative pro-nuke crowd. Three hundred yards across the river is Portsmouth. Incredibly prosperous, green, anti-nuke, liberal. How do you put the two together? Liz Lehrman using dance. Anyone who thought dance was the way to do it, put up your hand. You get a free book. soundup: LPA 49 01:22:32 What happens if you just change your focus - what happens if you just moved an ear? Track: Liz Lerman conceived of dance as something to bring different communities together to learn about each other through their shared art. Bite: LPA 49 01:22:14 We've got all the fragmenting that's going on around race and class and it seems to me that art is one of the ways that you can pull things together. I don't mean that we're all going to end up being mushy. I mean that we can bring our differences together. Track: Using grant money, she and hundreds of community members did just that. Bite: Better together tape 1 07:05:35 She spent two years - she and a group of people using dance as a way to do it - having people tell their stories to her and getting them to dance. And if you haven't seen a welder or a rigger 55-60 years old dancing in front of 1200 people, acting out a big crane , you ain't seen nothing. Bite: Steve camera 05:30:58 I want to emphasize the duration. They spent two years doing this and then a week doing the performance. But the two years are the key, not the one week's performance. But now, 6-7 years after this is done, there's a dozen organizations that owe their life and their birth to people working on the Shipyard Project. Track: Putnam and Feldstein say there are many measures of how interconnected a community is - which is just as well for NH. Todd Camera 05:20:20 YOU KNOW, NH HAS A WELL-EARNED REPUTATION FOR YANKEE THRIFT. AND STUDIES HAVE CERTAINLY SHOWN WE'RE NEAR THE BOTTOM IN CHARITABLE GIVING. I'M WONDERING WHAT YOUR PERSPECTIVES ON WHY THAT IS. AFTER ALL, NH IS A PLACE OF SMALLER COMMUNITIES, I WOULD THINK MORE COHESIVE KINDS OF NETWORKS. WHAT DO YOU THINK? Bite: Steve camera 05:20:40 There's probably no one factor that accounts for that one piece not running in parallel with all the other trends. The most important factor may be that we're a very low church state. We're the fourth or fifth least churched state in America, and since so much social capital is built out of the church and out of church membership. And you've got a very low church membership - and a lot of the giving comes from that. 50% of all giving in America goes to religion. So when we have a state with low religious membership, it's got to reflect itself in low giving. Bite: Todd Camera 05:21:10 SO IS IT JUST A LESSENED SENSE OF OBLIGATION ITSELF, OR IS IT THE SOCIAL NETWORK ITSELF THAT CREATES THE GIVING IF IT'S MORE OF A CHURCHED STATE? Bite: Steve camera 05:21:28 by almost all measures, not the philanthropy measure, but by almost all other measures that we have of social capital, of connectiveness, of caring for your neighbors and so on, NH is actually quite high, not low. Bite: Todd Camera 05:21:59 WHERE ARE WE WELL OFF IN SOCIAL CAPITAL? Bite: Steve camera 05:22:02 Oh, in many different measures. How often people go to meetings to talk about local affairs. I'm not talking about town meetings in the official sense - I'm talking about just hanging out with neighbors and talking about how the things in your town could be improved. Membership in civic organizations. Let me suggest the one that's the most unusual, that really stood out and I think surprised us. And that is the degree to which class makes a difference. In most places in the country, we don't usually talk about class in America. But if you measure class roughly by level of income and level of education, the higher the income and the higher the education, the more likely people are to be involved. And the less - less involved. And usually therefore a state that has high income and high education as we do is heavily involved. But in NH, people are less attentive to class, there is less distinction between the person who owns the mill and works on the floor of the mill; between the school superintendent and the janitor; less in difference in how involved they are, how trusting they are, how often they vote than in literally any other place we measured in the country. Steve camera 05:23:35 If you go to a public meeting in Los Angeles, to take the other extreme, the people who are likely to be there are the bank presidents. If you go to similar kind of meeting in NH, the bank presidents and the bank tellers and the bank tellers are all likely to be there. So we know that because we've asked thousands of people across the country about how often they go to meetings and how much time do they spend with friends and whether they vote and so on. So we know the facts. We know less about why it is that NH is so relatively - the class differences in social capital, in connections, are so much smaller. It's a terrific advantage in NH because it means all those resources among people who are not up in the top of the income distribution, all of their intelligence and social resources get utilized in NH in a way they don't in Los Angeles. MAYBE IT'S OUR LACK OF ZONING LAWS. Todd Camera 05:24:28 I'D LIKE FOR YOU TO DESCRIBE A SOCIETY THAT DOES NOT HAVE SOCIAL CAPITAL, OR HAS DEFICIENT SOICLA CAPITAL. WHAT KIND OF SOCIETY WOULD THAT BE? Steve camera 05:24:38 Well, it's a society or an organization in which you're always having to look over your shoulder to wonder if somebody is out to get you. It's one in which you have to look out for yourself because no one else is going to look out for you. It's a society in which you use up a lot of energy just worrying about whether your car is going to get broken into or your house is going to get broken into. It's a society in which there are a lot more lawyers because people are suing each other all the time. In general, what social capital does is to lubricate our relations with other people. Trust is a terrifically useful tool. Track: In this book, UPS delivery men, Chicago libraries, Philadelphia seniors and many others all share a role in building social capital, even if they don't know the jargon. Bite: Better together tape 1 07:08:25 Bonding social capital are your ties to people just like you. Bridging social capital are your ties to people unlike you. Bite: Better together tape 1 07:08;45 A society that has only bonding social capital looks like Bosnia or Belfast. And in a modern, pluralist society like ours, we need a whole lot of bridging social capital. It's not easy to build bridging social capital. Your grandmother knew that - she said 'birds of a feather flock together.' What she meant was bridging social capital was more difficult to build than bonding social capital. She didn't think you'd understand that - that's why she used the avian metaphor. Bite: Todd Camera 05:45:55 WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCOMPLISH WITH THIS BOOK? I'LL START WITH YOU LEW. Bite: Steve camera 05:46:04 We'd like to inspire people to do more, we'd like to help a growing group of people who think about application, who want to learn from this, who want to intentionally build social capital. We know the need is there, we know the power of it, and now we need to learn how to do it. And that's where we're lagging, that's what we're learning. And these cases begin to help us learn. Bowling Alone was a description of how America is going to hell in a handbasket and I didn't want to let the story rest there. I wanted to be able to say 'and here's some ideas - not my ideas, other people's ideas - on how we can begin to reweave the fabric of this community and I think we're making progress. Track: For NH Outlook, I'm Richard Ager. Maybe end with some book signing video |
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That wraps up our program from the State House in Concord. Thanks for watching NH Outlook, where NH talks. I'm Beth Carroll, I'll see you around New Hampshire. |
| Key: national politics / government Return to index of stories... |
NEW HAMPSHIRE OUTLOOK Air Date/Time: 12/3/2006 HOST: Beth Carroll Length: 15:00 NOW on New Hampshire Outlook: Are Americans retreating from political and public life? What one author says about bringing folks back to the public square. Plus, the glue that connects the fabric of our society. A conversation with the co-authors of "Better Together." We're broadcasting from the State House in Concord, where voices on all sides of the issues are heard -- and decisions are made regarding the future of New Hampshire. Hello. I'm Beth Carroll. Welcome to New Hampshire Outlook. Public participation, is it a thing of the past? Richard Harwood, founder of the "Harwood Institute for Public Innovation" Maryland, spent 13 years in cities and towns across America talking to people about politics and public life. The author and civic innovator found this country not to be a nation of red and blue states but a nation in full retreat from the public square. While folks are looking for "leaders" they are unwilling to participate themselves. Outlook's Phil Vaughn sat down with Harwood during a visit to Saint Anselm College in Manchester and found out there is hope. PRODUCER/REPORTER: Phil Vaughn NAME OF PARTICIPANTS: Richard Harwood\Founder, Harwood Institute |
| Key: Return to index of stories... |
NEW HAMPSHIRE OUTLOOK Air Date/Time: 12/3/2006 HOST: Beth Carroll Length: 11:00 NOW on New Hampshire Outlook: Are Americans retreating from political and public life? What one author says about bringing folks back to the public square. Plus, the glue that connects the fabric of our society. A conversation with the co-authors of "Better Together." We're broadcasting from the State House in Concord, where voices on all sides of the issues are heard -- and decisions are made regarding the future of New Hampshire. Hello. I'm Beth Carroll. Welcome to New Hampshire Outlook. In an age of eroding social institutions, there ARE leaders who are finding new ways to connect with citizens. That's the message of the book, "Better Together," by Harvard Professor Robert Putnam and Lew Feldstein, who heads the NH Charitable Foundation. Outlook's Richard Ager sat down with them for a conversation in 2003 at Harvard University in Cambridge. They spoke about their findings, and their hopes for constructive social change. PRODUCER/REPORTER: Richard Ager NAME OF PARTICIPANTS: Robert Putnam\Co-Author, "Better Together," Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University, Lew Feldstein\Co-Author, "Better Together", President, NH Charitable Foundation, Liz Lerman\Dance Exchange\1992 |