The Endowment Framework focuses attention on shared values and the critical dimensions of social life,
without which community well-being cannot be achieved.
Identify Critical Civic Dimensions of Cities
Like social capital, the endowments extend and stretch an economic concept for broader social purposes. Similar to stores of financial capital, institutional endowments can grow or be drawn down, but what social capital and the thriving endowments seek to measure—the dimensions of social life they aim to capture—are slightly different. Social capital refers to social networks with shared norms and values, such as reciprocity and trust. And, where there are large pools of social capital—places Robert Putnam has referred to as “civic communities”—local governments can leverage social trust to make government run more efficiently and to more successfully tackle social problems. However, whereas social capital is primarily a description of a general mode of social interaction (based on networks of trust, reciprocity), the endowment framework offers a typology of the most valuable kinds of social resources toward which communities should target investment; in short, it focuses attention on shared values and the critical dimensions or domains of social life, without whose health community well-being cannot be achieved.
Promote Resilience Through Integration
As noted, a thriving city is one in which its critical domains are activated and flourishing. The endowment paradigm, however, does not simply refer to a thriving city’s multidimensionality but also to the idea of integration: the well-being of a city emerges when the critical domains of a city are knitted into a web of mutual support. All six endowments are interrelated but, for the purpose of illustration, they can be sorted into two sets of triads—the true, good and beautiful in one set, and the just, profitable and sustainable in the other. Cities have always been places of learning, discovery and innovation; indeed, proximity facilitates collaboration, and information can be shared and built-upon at a rapid pace. Nevertheless, the quest to understand the complex operations of our social and bio-physical worlds does not guarantee that we know how to wisely engage and steward these entities. While the True increases our knowledge, the Good challenges us to make use of information and to deploy the fruit of our knowledge, technology, in ways that are ethically sound. The True and the Good, then, are, of necessity, closely bound together. Nonetheless, while expanding our existing stores of knowledge and clarifying our duties to others are vital, these activities are incomplete without the Beautiful. Absent the right adornment or creative “framing,” the True is often unable to persuade and, lacking the power of story to inspire empathy, mere awareness of duty often fails to lead to action. The Beautiful both engages our feelings and helps us to see and critically evaluate aspects of our world that are often invisible to scientific and moral reasoning.
Similarly, moving to another cluster of endowments (the Prosperous, Just and Well-ordered, and Sustainable), cities should aspire to be economically vibrant places—to provide individuals with opportunities for meaningful work and for the acquisition of the wealth necessary to support their own livelihood and that of others for whom they bear responsibility. However, if a city is poorly administered, if infrastructure is lacking or falls into disrepair, and if crime is rampant, prosperity is short-circuited; therefore, good governance and an efficient and trusted legal system are the indispensable platform for economic prosperity. Nevertheless, as crucial as economic prosperity and sound public policy may be, they are not adequate, in themselves, to promote thriving. For instance, it is possible for affluent and efficiently administered communities to have high rates of anxiety and depression or obesity and diabetes. And, sometimes, prosperity can be achieved at the expense of stocks of natural capital and the degradation of the surrounding environment. In short, no city can claim to be truly prosperous or just if it is beset with serious environmental or public health problems—human health and the health of natural systems being fundamental to all human thriving. In this introduction, there is not enough space to demonstrate how each endowment can be individually linked to each of the others, but the examples above should suffice to bring this interlocking web of relationships closer to intuition.
Address Polarization and Social Conflict
Finally, we are experiencing a cultural moment of intense partisanship and tribalism. This overarching context of social conflict makes reaching decisions about such matters as local levels of taxation, about spending on capital projects, or about community planning and design more difficult. Even local issues that were once less controversial—such as education or law enforcement/policing—have become hotly contested. While not a panacea, the vocabulary of the endowments attempts to depolarize community interactions by deploying both ancient and modern terminology (or, a mix of philosophical and practical concepts), a strategy that equips leaders with less politically freighted language that can be used to facilitate community conversations. The purpose of creating the conditions for civil dialog is not to suppress or set aside serious differences; instead, the goal is to orient citizens, who operate within a pluralistic context, toward discovering and then building upon whatever common ground and values exist.
In its community development process, TCL leverages the Civic Endowment Framework to help communities identify and prioritize their most pressing concerns and to build-up the civic capacity necessary to tackle these problems.