Three Elements Of Civic Engagement

Civic engagement is important to working together in order to resolve a social issue. Throughout this course, I have learned about civic engagement and what goes into civic engagement. For higher level engagement there are three elements that you would need: one, the social capital where people have resources to work together on an issue. Two, connectors is people that link other people together. Finally, third public dialogue also called public engagement that helps people pull together on one issue. All three of these elements work together for a higher engagement on the social issues that people face. Volunteering for only four hours can mean a world of differences for someone else; however, that is the start of civic engagement by using

Within the resources, there is bridging where diverse groups of people that build a relationship. Whereas, bonding is people that are like-minded and people building relationships that are like. Having both bridging and bonding you have social capital that increases civic engagement. Looking at Sauvie Island Center, they use both to make a strong network across the Portland area and the civic engagement is what drives the social capital to work. This social capital helps the communities get more active into the civic engagement that relates to connections from The Tipping Point (2002). Gladwell shows us how important social capital to civic engagement that it draws the line to getting the community involved by connectors (pg. __) that link people together making a network of

__). By having connectors, it can increase the number of resources people have different options and ways to do civic engagement. Take for instance Social Media for Nonprofit by Kevan Lee, he explains how social media can boost a nonprofit organization by spreading the word and finding connectors that have a large resource pool of people. For example, the highest four network in media is: "Facebook (98%), Twitter (~70%), LinkedIn (~55%), and YouTube (~45%)" (Lee, 2016). Seeing that Facebook is the highest percentage of the social network means that there are many connectors that sit there and find things on Facebook that they think needs to shared to other people. Being a connector by using the bridging and bonding to relay information to other people through word-of-mouth and other social media to get people involved with the communities that are around them and their own