Social Capital as a Mobilization Strategy - A MSU/Muskegon Collaboration

Year Awarded: 2002
Project Leaders:
Ken Frank, Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education, Mary B. McDonald, Family Coordinating Council, L. Annette Abrams, MSU Outreach Partnerships

Project Description:
During the 1980s and 90s a strong focus on coalition building at the community level emerged. This was spurred by funding requirements and an interest in maximizing organizational capacity and assets at the local level. Organizations forged collaborations to facilitate development and service delivery.

This coalition building can be considered a manifestation of the recent theory of social capital. Social capital is defined as "the potential to access resources through social relations." As such, social capital facilitates the flow of resources among people, making it a valuable asset to communities. Relying on social ties, community members share information, financial resources or duable goods. Little is known, however, about how to represent the distribution of social ties and how to use such a representation to access social capital. Our MSU/Muskegon collaboration has developed a model to represent the distribution of social capital within and between subgroups. Through this representation we contribute to community capacity by helping community members understand social ties available to problem solve, implement change and access varied resources.

We propose to replicate the model. The research objectives are to study the distribution of social capital within and between subgroups and to study the usefulness of this information to build best practices. The service objective is to help people measure and access the distribution of social capital in their communities.