Social connection policy with Sam Pressler
How can government promote community building?
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This newsletter talks a lot about community and social capital, and Sam Pressler is perhaps the person thinking hardest about what government can do about it. His blog, Connective Tissue, goes into the research, current events, and ideas surrounding community building. His recently published Connective Tissue Policy Framework is the most comprehensive collection of tangible policy ideas on community building that I’ve seen.
Sam and I discuss the current energy behind communitarian policy, how government can promote community building, and what readers themselves can do to promote it.
Why now for social connectedness
Johnny
2023 was a big year for policy interest on social connectedness. The surgeon general released his advisory on Social Isolation and Loneliness. Senator Chris Murphy proposed his National Strategy for Social Connection. Governor Wes Moore launched his Department of Service and Civic Innovation. Why are policy makers focusing on social connectedness now? Who has been talking to these dudes?
Sam
I think the conditions were ripe for an upswell in communitarianism. Here’s how I introduce the moment at the start of the policy framework:
“The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in 2020 can both be viewed as major shocks that challenged the existing sociopolitical paradigm. But these were also surface-level events, occurring atop a deeper current of decades of technological, economic, social, and cultural change that both hollowed out the core of communities and eroded trust in institutions and expertise. A half-century of conservative and liberal policymaking that elevated individualism, market deregulation, and the wisdom of experts has reached an extreme end point, leaving in its wake isolated individuals, weakened civic life, and widespread alienation and institutional distrust.” (p. 5)
All of this was a long time coming, but you can point to the Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness as a turning point. He puts this advisory out and publishes this op-ed in The New York Times, which creates this media whirlwind. Everyone begins attaching their own solution to the problem — like, “Can pickleball solve male loneliness? Can retaking Constantinople solve male loneliness?” While there has been a lot of unseriousness, there has also been a lot of attention to these issues.
The reason why, in my view, it got so much attention was because it touched on such a deep cultural nerve. People are feeling more isolated from one another. People are feeling more disconnected from the institutions that promote meaning and belonging in life. And this isn’t just a “vibe.” It’s a structural and cultural reality: we are more isolated from one another and we are more disconnected from religion, community, unions, and family.
Once the Surgeon General opened the door, you saw people like Senator Murphy, who was already doing some work around this, really stick his head out and get engaged. You saw mayors start expressing interest in getting engaged. But policymakers haven’t been intentionally focused on these issues since the last wave of communitarianism in the 1990s. And many don’t have a sense of where to begin.
The role of government
Johnny
What do you think is government's role in regenerating connection within communities?
Sam
I don't think policy should be the driver of this. It's weird for me to say because I just wrote this policy framework. But I do believe first and foremost, it requires both community-driven change and a deep change to the spiritual and cultural consciousness of our country to value different things — the community and the individual, obligations and rights.
But, even then, we can still ask, “Is there a role for policy to play?” The way I communicate the role of policy is it’s about creating the enabling conditions for connection within communities. I don't think policy and government should be playing a direct role in helping you make friends. But there are things that government can do that can create those conditions for more civic opportunities (e.g. more third places, more groups, more programs and activities), for more participation, and for more connection — all of which enable a positive feedback loop of connectedness to occur in communities.
Johnny
What are some examples?
Sam
I think about housing and neighborhoods as a place where we should be putting a lot of energy. Where we live fundamentally dictates who we interact with in our neighborhood, who we build relationships with, the places that we go, the groups that we join. And the way we've designed where we live has sorted us in so many ways: across lines of class, of race, of age, and more.
This housing affordability crisis is creating a once-in-a-generation moment for us to re-envision the role of housing and neighborhoods to strengthen connection within communities. But right now, the focus has almost exclusively been on the material — on building more units and on lowering costs.
It has not been, “What happens in the neighborhood when we build this?” We need to think about the role of neighborhood activation and neighborhood programming. Governments can very easily create microgrants — $250, $500 grants — for block parties, and people can begin interacting in the streets with one another. Government and philanthropy can fund local barbecues and neighborhood dinners for people to get to know one another. They can fund sports leagues and other types of violence interruption programming at the neighborhood level, especially in places that have low trust to get people interacting with one another. They can fund the creation of little community spaces like micro gardens and micro parks and enabling little pubs and cafés in communities so people have the space to connect. And they can create neighborhood-level leadership roles so that neighbors can consistently coordinate and host these types of neighborhood activities.
Another example is the opportunity we have around adult transition as a stage of the life course. Most cultures throughout history have had rites of passage that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. And those rites of passage shape who we become as members of the community. Unfortunately, the adult transition period in the U.S. has become the great sorter of our social lives by class, rather than the great connector like it once was.
But I think we have an opportunity to reimagine the adult transition as the great connector of American life, and there are a few different things we can do policy-wise.
One is what Maryland and California are doing: creating a state level of service year program where, ideally, a plurality of graduating high school seniors have a collective experience of service at the point of the adult transition. You get benefits from that to either go to college after or to do a vocational program after. But, in the process, you're actually having that shared cohort-based experience of cross-class, cross-geography participation and connection.
The second is domestic exchange programs. There's a group called the American Exchange Project in the US that takes high school juniors and seniors from very different places, and through a cohort-based program, helps them experience places that are very different from the ones they grew up in. For example, a group of teens from Palo Alto, CA may do an exchange with a group of teens from rural Texas. This experience allows them to build deep connections across class, geography, and political ideology. These types of exchanges are starting to be instantiated within state-level policy.
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What you can do
Johnny
If you're your average citizen reading this report, getting excited about the idea, but you're not in government or public health or urban planning, what would you like that person to do with this?
Sam
I think there are two levels to it. First, if you care about these things and you want your local government to care about these things, this can become a set of priorities to advocate for. For example, you can ask your local government, “Why don't we have a block party grant?” And you can organize your neighbors and try to get your government or local community foundation to start a block party grant. The policy opportunities within the framework can become priorities that you can put to your government and organize collective action towards that.
There are also some things that you don't need government to start doing. For instance, in Falls Church, VA community leaders somehow found out about this essay I wrote on why every community should have a welcome kit, which was adapted from the policy framework. And they were like, “Let's just start building neighborhood welcome kits.” Now, if you go on their website, there's a whole neighborhood welcoming page with all the resources. They took a policy opportunity from the framework and translated it to their local context.
So there are real things that you can look at this framework and say, “Oh, that's a cool idea. We don't need to wait for government. We can do it now.”
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Check out The Connective Tissue Policy Framework here
Check out Sam’s newsletter, Connective Tissue, here.
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