My Family and Social Capital



My dad is a mail carrier, my mom is a receptionist, and I am a student. Yeah, I’d say our social capital isn’t too bad! Each week, my dad delivers mail on a total of five different routes with an average of 600 residences and businesses per route. On each route he interacts with a variety of people with different intelligence levels and occupations. He has come to know people that are wealthy, poor, black, white, young, and old. Everyday he comes home from work with a new story of someone that he has befriended or has helped out around the house. He has shoveled peoples’ driveways, raked a yard for an 87 year old woman, read prescription directions to an illiterate man in his sixties, comforted a man who was in a motorcycle accident, and has been a good listener to people who need to tell their stories and sorrows. Each day is an adventure for my dad and he builds social capital everyday he goes to work.
Being a receptionist, my mom also deals with a vast amount of people. She works at a kitchen and bath design company where she greets clients everyday and is known as the face of the company. Whenever someone calls the company she not only directs them to the designer they are working with, but also gets to know each person she talks to. She asks people about their lives and gives her opinion about cabinets and accessories when people are making decisions. My mom speaks with cabinet vendors and installers. Through her job she gets to know many people around Winston-Salem who she might never have known otherwise. She generally deals with people who are quite well-off but still builds social capital through her daily communication with many people.
Going to a boarding school for the arts has definitely helped me be more successful at building social capital. I’ve met people from different states and spend each day getting to know people better. I am at school with my peers, teachers, and faculty more than I am at my own home. I spend hours a day at school speaking with people that have different opinions, beliefs, and personalities. I learn about the ways other people view the world and what the goals of other artists are. I’m a part of a group of performers that support each other and learn from each others differences.
Although my family is pretty good at building social capital there are still some ways that we could make more. While we have involvement with others at work and school, our full schedules often prevent us from joining clubs or having friends over on a regular basis. When we come home from our busy days we have to find time to clean the house, cook meals, do homework, and, heaven forbid, sleep. I could probably make more of an effort to hang out with different groups of people more often, but it can be hard to do this when I am on the mission of making sure I get everywhere on time and get my work done. My family is guilty of having our private little cars of seclusion and can be considered the 2.6 people per family, but hey who can blame us. My family does the best they can each day. We eat dinner together every night that I am home, spend quality time with one another, and know most of our neighbors. Maybe if everyone in the world wasn’t so obsessed with getting even richer and even more successful we would all have time to build more social capital.