We are proud to co-sponsor the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Award and Social Capital Practitioners Workshop alongside The RSA (The Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). As we advocate for a relational approach to addressing complex problems at scale, this research and workshop is aligned with our mission.

We applaud the groundbreaking research of the award recipient, Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights that underlined the importance of social connections as one of the driving factors of economic mobility.

We were also honored to co-host the funders roundtable, which brought together major funders who understood the need to support and strengthen the social capital field. This posed an opportunity for us to socialize the new paradigm of relational wealth to funders.

It was exciting to have more than 60 practitioners participating at the workshop. The organizations we invited work with vulnerable and marginalized populations from across the U.S. The feedback from our practitioner gathering was overwhelmingly positive.

After the workshop, the RSA hosted a series of focus groups over the summer that fed into the design of the Action Learning Network. This included: ensuring a venturing budget as part of the community (participatory budgeting), embedding funders in the network, creating opportunities for practitioners to lead on different thematic topics of interest, and creating a fair and inclusive governance structure to ensure community ownership. From the outset of this work we made sure to invite community practitioners that were diverse in leadership profile, experience, race and gender identity.

We are working with the RSA to launch an action learning network to bring together practitioners through peer learning, inspiration and solidarity. The aim is to launch an Action Learning Network, which will serve as a gathering of community of practice, focused on relational wealth and social connection interventions in 2025.

The workshop website has curated lists of organizations that hold social capital as an integral part of their work as well as a list of resources from different practitioner organizations, think tanks and academic institutions working on social connectedness.

“The strength of our societies and economies relies on the quality of our interactions and relationships. Valuing dignity and care in these exchanges is essential at every level.” – Carrie Freeman, Interim Executive Director, SecondMuse Foundation