Giving Compass' Take:

•  Julia Freeland Fisher, writing for The 74, discusses the factors to look at when trying to scale relationships. She explains that relationships play a vital role in children's lives as social capital becomes more important for student success. 

• How can donors provide opportunities for building social capital in schools?

• Read more about why youth need social capital and how schools can help. 

For months, my Twitter feed of educators and education reformers has been lighting up with praise for New York Times columnist David Brooks. In a sharp departure from some of his more technocratic arguments of years past, Brooks has been writing passionately about the essential — and oft-ignored — role that relationships play in our lives and the lives of children.

He’s spotlighted programs like StriveTogether and Thread, and philosophies like social-emotional learning that are doubling down on relationships.

Amid his relationship fever, however, Brooks insists on a stark limitation: “Relationships do not scale.”

He follows this assertion with the more encouraging caveat that norms, by contrast, do scale. If we want to weave the social fabric of our country back together, his argument goes, a norm or cultural movement that puts relationships first could spark mass investment in local community-building at a national scale.

In our research on innovations and policies that expand students’ social capital, we’re surfacing a host of possible solutions to overcome the seemingly fixed reservoirs of trust, bandwidth, time and, let’s face it, money that it takes to invest in relationships.

  1. Scaling Our Relationship Reservoirs.
  2. Scaling Support and Trust Online.
  3.  Scaling Public Investment. 
  4. Scaling New Business Models. 
  5. Scaling Relationships as Outcomes. 

None of these are relationships themselves, but they mark the tools, infrastructure and brokers that could put more relationships within reach, and keep them within reach, for more young people. That’s a healthy dose of scale.

Read the full article about scaling relationships by Julia Freeland Fisher at The 74.