My interview with Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution appears in the Summer 2005 issue of the journal Green Living. The principles of permaculture are simple, Mollison says. “The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.” Incidentally, the whole issue of Green Living is good. There is an especially interesting conversation with Marshall Rosenberg, the great psychologist, mediator, and proponent of non-violent communication.

A couple of years ago, the Pew Partnership for Civic Change and the Kettering Foundation invited me to take part in a series of dialogues among prominent foundation executives and nonprofit directors about the challenges of community-building. While the grantmaking community is reluctant to openly admit it, there is a pervasive sense today that community development programs, for all their good intentions, routinely fall short of their goals. All too often, they fail to tap into vital civic resources and energy, build effective relationships with the public, develop broad-based networks and coalitions, and sustain the commitment over the long haul.

What can foundations and nonprofits do to address the problem? This was the focus of three day-long dialogues, held over a twelve-month period, in Washington D.C. The conversations were rich, thought-provoking, perhaps even ground-breaking. Crafting more effective strategies, the participants believed, has to begin by paying greater attention to how communities come together to name and frame their problems, finding entry points for working with a diversity of people in the community, fostering integrative and sustainable partnerships, and developing more enlightened evaluation practices that reflect both qualitative and quantitative measures of community development.

The dialogues served as the basis for a report, Investing in Public Life, which was published last month. In it, I outline a range of strategies for accomplishing these goals. I also set forth some practical ideas for foundations and nonprofit organizations committed to building and strengthening local communities.

I’ve recently returned to several books from the 1960s and 1970s that were widely read and hotly debated at the time but have been largely forgotten in the intervening years. These titles are all out of print at this point. It’s a shame because they are brimming with far-sighted ideas, compelling insights, and still-timely wisdom.

Former University of Chicago physicist John Rader Platt wrote a wonderful little book in the mid-60s called The Step to Man, a lucid and highly original meditation on humanity’s next evolutionary leap. It makes some of today’s so-called new age ideas seem unoriginal and downright uninspired by comparison.

The iconoclastic French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel wrote a book in the early 1970s with the irresistible title Without Marx or Jesus that nicely sums up the existential crisis of our time. As he saw it, we find ourselves in a curious and somewhat painful predicament now that we can no longer fall back on ready-made ideologies and comfortable systems of belief. So what’s left? Where do we take refuge? That’s the question Revel says is haunting us as we transition into the 21st century.

I’ve also been rediscovering the genius of Kenneth Boulding, the late futurist and economist (and an old friend of my family, as it happens). His book The Meaning of the Twentieth Century is still amazingly fresh and original though it was written some forty years ago.

Finally, there’s Lewis Mumford, someone I return to again and again for ideas and inspiration. A towering intellect and a creative thinker. Almost all of his books are first-rate, but lately I’ve been reading The Transformations of Man, a masterful survey of those rare and pivotal moments in human history when an entirely new way of perceiving the world broke into popular consciousness and thereby changed the course of civilization.

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a project aimed at assessing post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka. The question we’re asking is whether the massive relief effort in South Asia is working as intended — whether people are receiving the aid they have been promised, whether they have a voice in the redevelopment process, and what can be done on the part of western aid organizations and charities to better assist those in need during the transition.

The project team consists of a small development staff in California, three field researchers in Sri Lanka, a Boston-based webmaster, and a dedicated group of student researchers at several University of California campuses. The initiative also has a distinguished advisory board made up of prominent activists, academics, and development experts.

The project website, just unveiled, is at www.reclaiminitiative.org

Better Together brings together a dozen case studies of successful community-building efforts in the United States. The book is an outgrowth of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America, a three-year dialogue among leading thinkers and activists about how to build and strengthen the American community (though it bears little resemblance to the Seminar’s final report of the same name).

As Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein note in the book’s opening pages, the stories in the book represent “exceptional cases in which creative social entrepreneurs [are] moving against the nationwide tide and creating vibrant new forms of social connectedness.” The book is presented as a response to civic leaders, local officials, foundation executives, community activists, and others who believe that the decline of civic engagement documented in Putnam’s Bowling Alonecan be reversed.

“We focus on these social-capital success stories,” Putnam and Feldstein write, “hoping and believing that they may in fact be harbingers of a broader revival of social capital in this country.” The examples they present are certainly robust and successful enough to serve as convincing models for how to build strong and sustainable communities.

They devote a chapter each to:

• Valley Interfaith, a coalition of church and school groups in the Rio Grande Valley that, like its sister organizations in the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation, uses the grassroots organizing model to build relationships, develop civic leaders, create a culture of small-group dialogue, and mobilize broad-based political action.
• The branches of the Chicago Public Library that have become a major force for social connection and civic revitalization in and around Chicago by refashioning themselves as vibrant community centers.
• The Shipyard Project in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, an initiative that helped reconnect a divided community through a creative arts project that expressed through dance the history and work of the local naval shipyard.
• The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a community revitalization project in Boston that rescued a neighborhood from the brink of catastrophic decline.
• The social and economic transformation of Tupelo, Mississippi, from a dying cotton town in one of the poorest counties in the state into a thriving and prosperous community that became the top dairy county in the United States.
• Saddleback, a mega-church in Orange County, California, that attracts more than 45,000 congregants through a mixture of flashy shows featuring popular music and big video screens and small-group gatherings where members can get to know one another, build relationships, receive support, and discuss public and private issues.
• The Waupun, Wisconsin chapter of the Do Something League, a national organization established to encourage community activism and develop leadership skills among young people.
• The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based union that creates social capital through extensive and time-consuming face-to-face conversations between two people, or among small groups of people, because it is an effective strategy for sustaining the organization.
• Experience Corps, an organization of seniors, mostly women, ranging in age from fifty-something to their seventies and eighties, who volunteer fifteen hours a week tutoring kids, offering support, and building community in the schools of greater Philadelphia.
• United Parcel Service, an example of a corporation that sponsors community volunteering and workplace flexibility to allow employees to reconcile their professional duties with their family and community obligations, not so much out of altruism but because it stimulates profits in the long run.
• Craigslist.org, a “virtual community” based in San Francisco that uses the Internet not as an alternative but as a supplement to face-to-face communication in order to forge connections between people in the community, foster dialogue about local issues, and create free public “spaces” where the community can find itself.
• Portland, Oregon, a city that has bucked the national trend and experienced a remarkable civic renaissance over the last two decades thanks in part to innovative leadership, a tradition of community activism, and a vibrant culture of public participation.

While Putnam and Feldstein admit that their collection of stories offers no blueprints or secret recipes for creating social capital, they draw out some of the common themes and offer a set of tentative guidelines in the concluding chapter. One of their key findings is that social capital is best realized in the pursuit of some other goal or set of goals. In all the cases in the book, social connectedness was a byproduct of working toward some specific objective, not an end in itself.

The case studies also suggest that building social capital is time-consuming and labor intensive. It can only develop through a process of relationship-building based on trust and reciprocity. Sharing personal and collective stories are often a critical part of this process. Narratives, Putnam and Feldstein state, “help people construct and reconstruct their interests…. Telling and listening to stories creates empathy and helps people find the things they have in common, which then eases the formation of enduring groups and networks.”

Another common theme is the importance of building in a redundancy of contact in any social capital initiative so that people encounter one another in multiple settings and contexts. This reinforces a sense of reciprocal obligation and extends the boundaries of empathy in the community.

“Reweaving social webs,” Putnam and Feldstein conclude, “will … depend on our ability to create new spaces for recognition, reconnection, conversation, and debate. Creating these spaces will require innovative uses of technology, creative urban and regional planning, and political will.”

Earlier today, ABC-TV’s The View featured my photography from the Burning Man festival in a segment on “Best Places to Pop the Question.” It was a somewhat vacuous piece, let’s be honest. Who would ever recommend Burning Man as a romantic getaway? The idea is preposterous. Black Rock City is just too hot, too dusty, too crowded, too overstimulating. Besides, as anyone who has been there will tell you, the event really puts relationships to the test. Issues that are unspoken and unresolved between people invariably come up in a harsh and unrelenting desert environment. But never mind. The idea certainly sounds romantic! And with Valentine’s Day around the corner, romance, even in it’s most empty-headed form, seems to carry the day.