You’ve got a friend in me How social capital enriches our lives

By: Melanie Otero

As Kemberly Bush listened to Dr. Raj Chetty, keynote speaker at the Securing Our Future Economic Mobility Summit in early December 2022 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, she was jumping up and down inside.

Chetty, professor of Public Economics at Harvard University and director of Opportunity Insights, was presenting his groundbreaking “big data” findings showing how an individual’s social network can be a factor in their ability to earn more and achieve the American Dream. The room was full of social service leaders like Bush, chief executive officer of Pathways to Prosperity, who had gathered for the one-day summit hosted by Palm Beach County’s Community Services Department to share learning on how to move people out of poverty.

Chetty revealed U.S. maps comparing upward mobility with economic connectedness, explaining that it is exactly in the places where low-income people have lots of high-income friends that economic mobility is higher.

“It was validation, it was confirmation,” Bush said. “It was all about social capital, and bringing other people in. It is real. You can move people by the connections they have. I have seen it.”

Moving in the Right Circles

Bush has witnessed people moving from poverty to prosperity through a model called Circles®. Adopted by her organization in 2014, Circles offers participants, referred to as Circle Leaders, the opportunity to identify their strengths to improve their lives and to build community around them. “I had been in social work for 25 years before discovering Circles,” said Bush. “I hadn’t heard of anything like this where upper-income and lower-income people come together forming real bonds and friendships. This is not a program, it’s a movement.”

Building community around a Circle Leader begins with pairing them with a Circles Ally, a person or family who brings their knowledge, experience, and economic connections to support the leader’s goals. It’s more than help. It’s genuine friendship, forging bonds, and offering bridges to an Ally’s social capital, the connections that are often commonplace among people at higher-income levels, such as college or career networks, or neighbors with influence. It’s the one thing that’s missing from a Leader’s circle to help them break the cycle of poverty—the economic connectedness that Chetty identified as the pathway to upward mobility.