Better Together Summary

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,
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
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