How to think structurally about connection within communities

A simple, work-in-progress framework to identify and address community-level barriers to connection

I recognize that my “work days,” if you can call them that, are rather strange. In one meeting, I’m asking a policymaker how they think about strengthening social capital through their policies and programs. In the next, I’m learning about how a CrossFit gym is promoting connection for neighbors in recovery. I have conversations like these everyday. And from these conversations, it’s clear that community-builders have answers for how to strengthen connection at the individual level. Initiatives like Thread, GatherFor, and Portland Community Squash have all meaningfully improved their participants’ relational lives. But one question continues to challenge policymakers and practitioners alike: what does it take to bolster connection at the community level?  

Beginning to answer this question requires that we have some sort of framework for understanding how relationship formation happens within communities. We need to understand where people experience community, how people participate in it, and with whom they form relationships. When we fail to think systematically like this, we end up with a lot of noise—from New York Times columnists claiming that pickleball and park benches are the solutions to loneliness, to individualized self-help practices that speak nothing to the structures that promote (or hinder) connection. 

In recent months, I’ve felt the need to cut through this noise and understand community-level connection better myself. So, I’ve drawn on a few existing concepts to develop a basic, very work-in-progress framework that I’ve been using in my work: civic infrastructure is where we experience community, participation is how we experience community, and relationships are who we experience community with. This structure, as simple as it sounds, can offer a map for local policymakers, practitioners, and neighbors to identify community-level barriers to connection and to design solutions to meet their community’s connection needs. 

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Where: Civic Infrastructure

Civic infrastructure refers to the containers where Americans can cultivate relationships outside of home or work. Civic infrastructure includes two key ingredients: (1) the physical third places where we experience community; and (2) the religious and non-religious institutions, groups, programs, and activities that bring these places to life. It takes both of these ingredients for a community to have vibrant civic infrastructure. This civic infrastructure, simply put, is foundational for building social capital and civic opportunity. Cities and neighborhoods that are lacking in civic infrastructure will, in general, have lower rates of civic participation and social connection. And places with less accessible forms of civic infrastructure will, in general, have more socioeconomic disparities in participation and connection. 

Policymakers and practitioners can play a meaningful role in strengthening a community’s civic infrastructure. For example, when Richmond, VA received $155M in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds in 2021, Mayor Levar Stoney’s team launched an in-depth community engagement process asking, “how would you spend $155M on your city?” What they heard, time and again, is that many neighborhoods within the city lacked third spaces where youth and adults could safely gather. So they applied $78M of this ARP funding to build two new community centers and renovate two existing ones—all in historically disinvested neighborhoods in Richmond’s east, south, and north sides. When complete, all residents of these neighborhoods will be within a 10-minute walk of one of these community centers, each of which will provide programming to local youth, adults, and seniors.

How: Participation

Participation refers to the different acts or processes of engagement in a community’s civic infrastructure. Forms of participation can range from one-off engagements, to ongoing membership and voluntarism, to types of community leadership and stewardship. Participation both sustains our civic infrastructure and is one of the main ways community members build relationships with one another. When a city or neighborhood has barriers to participation in its civic infrastructure—whether they be physical, economic, or cultural—this can weaken the relational lives and social connectedness of its residents who do not have access. 

Participation can be influenced at both the community and organizational level. The YMCA, for example, tends to cater to the upper middle class and middle class residents in a community, largely because lower income people cannot afford the membership dues. Mark Dengler—the former EVP of the Boston YMCA and current COO of the Los Angeles YMCA—recognized this dynamic playing out in each region and decided to take action. In both places, he launched initiatives to simultaneously lower membership fees across the networks and ramp up fundraising. Within a year of implementation, the Boston and LA YMCAs went from over-representing high- and middle-income residents, to becoming completely representative of each region’s socioeconomic composition. By identifying an economic barrier to participation and designing a targeted strategy to address it, Mark and his team successfully transformed the class dynamics of two major YMCA networks.

Who: Relationships

Community relationships are the connections that people form as a result of participating in their local civic infrastructure. Our community relationships can take many forms—bonding and bridging, strong and weak ties—and can vary in structure, function, and quality. These relationships can be seen as an outcome of access to and participation in civic infrastructure: places with higher levels of access and participation will, on the whole, have higher and more equal levels of social connectedness. These relationships can also be viewed as a driver of access and participation, providing critical information about opportunities to participate in community and the encouragement to actually get involved. In this way, relationships complete the virtuous cycle of community-building. More accessible civic infrastructure generates higher participation rates, higher participation rates lead to more community relationships, and more community relationships drive even higher rates of participation.

While policymakers and practitioners can map civic infrastructure and measure participation at the community-level, they have limited tools to understand community-level connectedness. Existing resources offer a helpful starting point, including the Social Capital Project’s state- and county-level indices of social capital, the Social Capital Atlas’ zip code-level measures of cross-class connection, and Connect2Affect’s county-level metrics of social isolation among older adults. Despite the emergence of these resources in recent years, major gaps still exist: these datasets are disconnected from each other, the data is not currently being tracked over time, and they are missing several components of connection. Here, philanthropy can play a significant role, both in aggregating these existing community-level measures in one place and funding research to develop new community-level measures where gaps exist. Taken together, this can equip policymakers, neighborhood leaders, and residents to better understand the state of connection in their communities and take more informed action where needed. 

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Cultivating connection and social capital at the community level takes more than just pickleball courts and park benches. It demands a holistic, systematic understanding of the gaps in a community’s civic infrastructure, the barriers to participation in it, and targeted, community-driven strategies to eliminate these gaps and barriers. This simple framework offers one place to begin.  

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