The Saguaro Seminar
The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America is an ongoing initiative of Professor Robert D. Putnam at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The project focuses on expanding what we know about our levels of trust and community engagement and on developing strategies and efforts to increase this engagement. A signature effort was the multi-year dialogue on how we can increasingly build bonds of civic trust among Americans and their communities.
The Saguaro Seminar strives to develop a handful of far-reaching, actionable ideas to significantly increase Americans' connectedness to one another and to community institutions. In selecting this goal, the Saguaro Seminar is explicitly neither developing a civic engagement blueprint for the twenty-first century that specifies every action to be taken, nor producing a cookbook with thousands of potentially promising programs that may lead to civic engagement. It seeks to publicize a few approaches, networks, organizations, or strategies that are working but need to be exploited more broadly both to build effective social trust and reciprocity in neighborhoods nationwide and to loosen America's hardened civic arteries.
Contact Information
The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America
Harvard Kennedy School of Government
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: (617) 495-1148
Website: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/