THE LAST WORD
s h ay ly n r omn ey g a r r et t
ON AMERICA’S NEXT COMEBACK IN HER RECENT BOOK, SHAYLYN ROMNEY GARRETT ARGUES THAT COMMUNITY WILL SAVE US BY LO IS M. CO LLIN S
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sk shaylyn romney garrett who she is and she’ll tell you she’s a Latter-day Saint, a working mom approaching middle age and someone who’s “always exploring at the edge” of what those descriptions mean. She says she’s a “changemaker” seeking community, connection and healing “in a fragmented world.” She is also co-author with Robert D. Putnam of “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again” and “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.” What it takes to build bridges and what kind of human dynamite can knock them down has been a thread she’s pulled at most of her life, including scouring the country with David Brooks’ Aspen Institute initiative, Weave, to find people crafting communities in different ways. She speaks Arabic and lived for six years in the Middle East, two of them with the Peace Corps teaching English in a public girls school. That inspired her to launch a nonprofit called Think Unlimited that taught creativity, critical thinking and social entrepreneurship. She tells her own story on the blog Project Reconnect. Garrett and her husband, James, have a daughter named Sophie, 7, and year-old son named Aeon. The family also includes a dog named Dewey after one of her favorite progressives, John Dewey. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What contributed to your interest in community? The roots of this go way back to my upbringing as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These communities are 84 DESERET MAGAZINE
unique, particularly in the modern American landscape. We know from the data that they have high amounts of social capital, which is how we measure connection and community. When I was young, I just knew how it felt to grow up in a tight-knit supported community. Then, when I got to Harvard, I took Putnam’s sophomore seminar, when he began teaching the research behind “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” I was captivated by the thesis that American connectedness and social capital had been in dramatic decline for 50 years. That was 20 years ago and the decline has only deepened. Yet Latter-day Saint communities, while not entirely exempt, have been an outlier. How do you define community? There are different aspects: One is our experience of feeling connected to human beings. In that sense, the opposite would be loneliness. Another is social trust — the sense that most people around me can be trusted, they have my welfare in mind, they’re generally not out to get me. And that we’re all trying to make it through the world and get ahead in life together, rather than every man for himself. Another aspect is a sense of belonging, of being part of a group that is hanging together, whether that group’s trying to accomplish something together, or is defined by shared identity. That sense of belonging can be big — like I belong as an American — or narrow, like I am a working mom approaching middle age. I could feel a sense of community with other women who are like myself. ILLUST RAT ION BY R ANDY GLASS
