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Printed from The Vanier Institute of the Family's website at www.vifamily.ca. © 2007.
All Together Now: Creating a Social Capital Mosaic In this book, Frances Ricks, Jennifer Charlesworth, Gerard Bellefeuille, and Anne Field extend an invitation to join in their search to discover the essential foundations of community. Each author has worked in the child, youth, family, and community services field. Their experience serves as an essential resource from which they both question conventional community development strategies and go on to isolate and identify the elements of what they call the "Social Capital Mosaic". Illustrated throughout by real stories of what works and what doesn't, this book opens up for discussion topics and ideas usually only encountered in conversations around the water cooler or in the hallways between workshops at professional conferences. It is there most often that we hear talk about how our best and most humane intentions are perversely thwarted by the "system" of service and care within which we work. Their examination of the Social Capital Mosaic is distinguished from much that is written today precisely because they do not take community for granted as though it were a perennial that blooms anew each and every year without much care and attention. They know that the recent "rediscovery" of community is all too often naïve and expedient, and that it is not possible to simply turn on a "thousand points of civic light." There is no recipe for social capital here. Rather what the authors provide is a much-improved list of ingredients that we must cultivate, assemble, and blend as we seek to renew the lives we live together. 151 pp., 1999, $20.00
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