This resulted in my posting the following pledge:
I will smile and say "hello" to strangers I pass on the streets in my neighborhood but only if 50 residents of Boston, Massachusetts, USA will too.
I'm an enthusiastic participant in the Boston Foundation's "What's Next?" seminar series. This is a program that seeks to bring together leaders of all ages to exchange insights and expertise about Greater Boston's challenges and opportunities. One goal of the series is to foster a diverse, active, and intergenerational network of leaders to lay the groundwork for sustained action on shared civic goals.
(For more information about the "What's Next?" series, please see the Boston Foundation's web site.)
One of the issues that comes up continually is our concern about Boston's future. Good people are moving away, or refusing to consider moving here, because they perceive Boston as a cold and unwelcoming to outsiders.
This is a complicated problem among many other problems, and there is no simple solution. However, I'm convinced that this is not a situation so dire that incremental change is impossible.
Therefore, I am making a pledge to get started by smiling and saying hello to strangers that I pass on the streets of my neighborhood.
As of this writing, 43 individuals have gone online to sign up for this pledge. We received an unexpected boost from Adrienne Samuels of the Boston Globe, who wrote an article about the project that was published in this morning's edition. I'm not really crazy about the article's sub-heading ("Bostonians seen as cold snobs") , but was delighted that Adrienne put across the main point, which was that encouraging people to say hello to strangers in their neighborhoods is just one modest goal. We need to do much better at building affordable housing and increasing economic opportunities in Boston - creating social capital by smiling in every day social interactions is not sufficient in itself. Still, it's a good start in introducing the idea of online pledges in our community.
If you're interested in reading more on the topic of increasing social capital, check out these papers:
If you'd like to email this pledge to a friend or colleague in the Boston area, or create a local version of this pledge for your own town, PledgeBank makes this very easy.
