2. Social capital & community development

Participating in social and civic activities, such as community group meetings, child care arrangements with neighbours, neighbourhood watch schemes and voting, all work to produce a resource called social capital. Social capital is critical to the health, wealth and wellbeing of populations.¹ It is a key indicator of the building of healthy communities through collective and mutually beneficial interaction and accomplishments.² Recent research has linked these types of activities to improved health outcomes.^{3, 4, 5, 6}

The notion of social capital represents a way of thinking about the broader determinants of health and about how to influence them through community-based approaches to reduce inequalities in health and wellbeing.⁷ A focus on social capital supports a balance of strategies that address behaviour and those that focus on the settings in which people live, work and play. The implication for integrated health promotion is that more emphasis is needed on efforts to strengthen the mechanisms by which people come together, interact and, in some cases, take action to promote health. Simple measures, such as providing space for people to meet, may be as health promoting as providing health information in an effort to change behaviour.

Service providers can also enhance the social capital within a community by supporting community projects that bring neighbours together to achieve a mutually beneficial goal, such as beautifying the environment of a public housing estate, establishing a community fruit and vegetable garden or working with the local sporting club to encourage all parts of the community to participate in sporting activities.

Community development, in very simple terms, is the process of developing social capital.⁸ It is a process that emphasises the importance of working with people as they define their own goals, mobilise resources, and develop action plans for addressing problems they have collectively identified.⁹

Footnotes:

1. Putnam, R. (1993), Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
2. Baum, F., Palmer, C., Modra, C., Murray, C. and Bush, R. (2000), ‘Families, social capital and health’, in Winter, I. (ed.), Social Capital and Public Policy in Australia, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Melbourne.
3. Berkman, L. and Syme, S. (1979), ‘Social networks, host resistance, and mortality: A nine-year follow-up study of Alameda County residents’, American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 109, no. 2, pp. 186–203.
4. Kawachi, I., Kennedy, B., Lochner, K. and Prothrow-Smith, D. (1997), ‘Social capital, income inequality, and mortality’, American Journal of Public Health, vol. 87, no. 9, pp. 1491–8.
5. Baum, Palmer, Modra, Murray and Bush, op. cit.
6. Kawachi, I., Colditz, G., Ascherio, A., Rimm, E., Giovannucci, E., Stampfer, M. and Willet (1996), ‘A prospective study of social networks in relation to total mortality and cardiovascular disease in men in the USA’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, vol. 50, pp. 245–51.
7. Gillies, P. (1998), ‘Effectiveness of alliances and partnership for health promotion’, Health Promotion International, vol. 13, no. 2.
8. Cox, E. 1995, A Truly Civil Society, ABC Books, Sydney.
9. Minkler M. (1990) ‘Improving health through community organization’. In K. Ginz, F.M. Lewis and B.K. Rimer, (Eds) Health behavior and health education: theory, research and practice. San Francisco: Josey Bass.

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