Putnam Awarded Kennedy School Research Grant

Kennedy School Professor Robert D. Putnam, an authority on social capital best known for his essay “Bowling Alone,” will gain a hand with his research on civic involvement, thanks to a grant given to the Kennedy School of Government’s Saguaro Seminar, by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Putnam and fellow researcher Thomas H. Sander plan to use the $275,618 grant to study how social context affects volunteering and civic participation. Both men are involved with the Saguaro Seminar, which works to improve the measurement of social capital—the set of resources, available in social networks, that lead people to help and get help from their connections—and studies this information to develop ways to improve civic involvement.

“We have found some evidence of a growing ‘class gap’ in civic involvement in America, with younger Americans from well-off backgrounds increasing their participation in politics and society, while kids from the wrong side of the tracks are increasingly dropping out,” wrote Putnam, who founded the Seminar in 1995, in an e-mailed statement. “This generous new grant will help us better understand the dimensions of this problem, and to explore its origins.”

The grant, which the Corporation for National and Community Service is awarding for the first time, was announced yesterday at the annual meeting of the National Conference on Citizenship in Washington, D.C. Sander, the executive director of the Seminar, said he learned they had been awarded the grant two weeks ago.

According to Sander, he and Putnam will be using the grant to analyze data collected by the U.S. government on civic participation, a study he said he expects will take two or three years.

“I’m hoping that we’ll get a much better view of how participation in America looks across social classes,” Sander said.

The Corporation for National Service, a federal agency that works to foster volunteering and civic involvement in the United States, is awarding the grants as a way to attract top researchers to study government data on volunteering and civil engagement, according to Corporation spokesman Sandy Scott.

“We’re excited that Harvard, which already has a strong track record of promoting citizen service, will be putting its brain power to studying questions of citizen service,” Scott said.

Johns Hopkins, Penn State, Tufts, Duke, and Washington State also received grants from the Corporation.

—Staff writer Lauren D. Kiel can be reached at lkiel@fas.harvard.edu.