(Art by iStock/wacomka)
The effectiveness of local civic action depends on community members coming together to address issues of common interest, usually with support from local organizations. But what happens when the demographics of a community vary over time to reflect greater income inequality and racial diversity? Does this affect community engagement?
Wesley Longhofer, Giacomo Negro, and Peter W. Roberts, of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, explored how well local organizations and residents come together for collective action as racial and economic heterogeneity increases. Traditionally, individuals volunteer through their religious organization or club, or are brought together through participation in their children’s public education.
“In a rapidly changing community, tensions between lower and higher income and wealth groups, among whites and people of color, as well as diverse gender identities [are critically important] for the future of their local community,” says Susan Saegert, professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
The researchers focused on three decades of data describing local Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF (TOT-UNICEF) campaigns across 3,108 counties. Established more than 50 years ago, the TOT-UNICEF program is typically administered by schools, clubs, and religious organizations. It outfits children with coin-collection boxes to go door to door in their communities on Halloween. The aim is to raise money and awareness for efforts that assist the world’s most vulnerable children. The program comprises thousands of localized campaigns and in total collects millions of dollars annually. The data analyzed in this study included three consecutive US Census years (1990, 2000, and 2010) and covered more than 8,000 campaigns organized by schools, more than 8,000 by churches, and almost 2,000 by clubs. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics provided information about the racial composition of public schools.
As with other local civic action, the effort requires action by all constituencies at the grassroots level to succeed. Support organizations need to obtain collection boxes from UNICEF and mobilize trick-or-treaters, and households need to stockpile coins to donate. Then, in the weeks after Halloween, the campaign organizer gathers the boxes and remits the collected funds to UNICEF. Underlying such community collaboration is a shared interest in working together to support an issue of common appeal—whether the cause is local or, in the case of UNICEF, global.
The researchers’ calculations of demographics and TOT-UNICEF revenues yielded results that confirmed their hypothesis that changing community conditions impeded residents’ ability to come together to support specific issues. Typical decade-long changes in racial diversity and income inequality reduced campaign effectiveness by 8.5 percent and 14.8 percent, respectively. That impact is likely not an isolated one, Roberts says: “Our findings likely generalize to any collective event that requires a lot of face-to-face interaction, whether it be similar fundraising schemes (blood drives, AIDS walks, and so on) or something like political canvassing.”
Over the long term, the authors believe, segregation along racial and income lines is sure to have a detrimental impact on any cause that depends on community support. With increasing racial and economic diversity having such a striking impact on the UNICEF campaign, researchers sought to understand which pathway to collective action—religious organization, club, or school—would be the most effective.
Churches and the like are among the first to step up to ask their congregations to support charitable causes. But as community heterogeneity increases and different cultures and social groups splinter off, individual churches tend to remain relatively homogenous, and their ability to serve as social bridges to the community at large erodes. The study showed that as county-level diversity between 1990 and 2000 increased by 4.5 percent, church-organized TOT-UNICEF campaigns were 13.6 percent less effective. As income inequality increased over the same period by 5.5 percent, church-led campaigns collected 47.6 percent less money for UNICEF.
The picture was markedly different when the researchers looked into the school-led campaigns. Their effectiveness increased by 4.7 percent in the face of growing diversity, and increasing income inequality led to a 9.1 percent bump in donations. Because the very structure of public schools requires that they facilitate regular interactions among young people and their families, who are as culturally, racially, and economically diverse as the larger community, they were uniquely capable of fostering social engagement and marshaling community resources behind the UNICEF campaign.
“We do not believe that churches and clubs are problematic per se,” Roberts says. “Rather, we see them as being subject to the same ‘hunkering down’ processes that characterize communities at large.”
“The study identifies many critical issues in promoting civic action,” says Saegert, who cautions that TOT-UNICEF may not be representative of most civic actions. “The strength of the argument lies in the issue of mandatory engagement.”
Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.