What I Learned From Building a Neighborhood Out of Jenga Blocks

 

I have spent a surprising amount of time lately thinking about Jenga blocks.

Not because I have suddenly become competitive at family game night, but because I have been developing an educational activity called Social Capital Jenga: Building, Breaking, and Restoring Neighborhoods.

And to be honest, because I had 108 blocks to paint (both ends in assorted colors).

The idea is simple. A Jenga tower represents a neighborhood. The individual blocks represent things that contribute to community strength—trust, economic development, neighborhood safety, the environment and personal health.

Other blocks represent pressures on a community, including individualism, greed, mobility and scarcity.

Then there are cards describing things that happen in real neighborhoods. Depending on what happens, players may remove a block, add a stress block, return a block or leave the tower unchanged.

Eventually, of course, the neighborhood falls. That is where the lesson begins.

Communities Rarely Collapse All at Once

When a Jenga tower crashes onto the table, everyone knows exactly when the collapse happened.

But identifying what caused it is much harder.

Was it the last block removed? Probably not.

The tower had been getting weaker for several turns. One piece disappeared here. Another was removed there. Pressure was added somewhere else. Eventually, the structure could no longer withstand another change.

Communities can work the same way. We tend to look for dramatic explanations when neighborhoods struggle. But communities are often weakened gradually.

A neighbor moves away. Someone stops attending neighborhood meetings. A longtime business closes. People spend less time outside.  Residents stop asking one another for help. Trust declines. People become more isolated.

None of those things alone necessarily causes a community to collapse. But remove enough pieces of social capital and eventually the neighborhood becomes fragile.

That may be one of the most important lessons I learned while developing this game: community decline is often cumulative.

Not All Blocks Are Equal

Another thing became apparent as I worked on the game. A neighborhood needs different kinds of strength. Trust matters. Safety matters. Economic opportunity matters. Healthy residents matter. Well-maintained shared spaces matter.

But they also interact.

A neighborhood might have beautiful houses and still have residents who barely know one another. It might have successful businesses but little trust. It might have low crime but residents who feel socially isolated.

A strong neighborhood is not simply a collection of houses in good condition.

It is an ecosystem of relationships.

That is why I gave trust more blocks than any other community strength in the game. Relationships, reliability and confidence in one another provide much of the invisible infrastructure that holds a community together.

We rarely notice that infrastructure when it is working.

We certainly notice when it disappears.

Stress Changes the Structure

I also wanted the game to demonstrate that communities do not operate in perfect conditions.

Neighborhoods experience stress. People move frequently. Families face financial pressures. Residents become more individualistic. Resources become scarce. People begin protecting what they have rather than sharing what they can.

The important insight is that stress doesn't simply remove something from a neighborhood.

Sometimes it changes the structure itself.

That distinction matters. A community facing challenges needs more than programs. It needs relationships strong enough to absorb pressure. That is resilience.

Small Things Can Have Surprisingly Large Consequences

Perhaps my favorite part of developing Social Capital Jenga was creating the scenario cards.

I expanded the deck to 122 neighborhood-based situations that I have seen or experienced.

That forced me to think about a question I have been studying for years: What actually strengthens or weakens a neighborhood?

The answers are often surprisingly ordinary: a conversation, a shared meal, an introduction, a neighborhood cleanup, helping someone carry something, checking on an older neighbor, inviting someone to a gathering, or learning a neighbor's name.

These actions can seem insignificant when viewed individually. But so does one wooden block.

The lesson of Jenga is that little pieces matter because they are part of something larger.

We Often Don't Appreciate Social Capital Until It Is Gone

There is another lesson hidden in the tower. Social capital is largely invisible.

You cannot drive through a neighborhood and easily measure how much residents trust one another. You cannot determine from property values whether someone has a neighbor they could call at 2 a.m. You cannot tell from freshly mowed lawns whether residents feel that they belong.

Yet those relationships become incredibly important during difficulty. Like when a storm hits, or someone is sick, or a family experiences a crisis, or an older resident needs assistance.

Suddenly, the invisible network becomes visible.

The question becomes: Who knows whom? Who trusts whom? Who will show up?

The strength of a community is revealed by the relationships that existed before the emergency.

Recovery Is Possible

I did not want Social Capital Jenga to simply demonstrate community decline. That would be depressing—and incomplete.

So the game also includes recovery. Some cards allow players to return blocks to the tower.

That may be the most hopeful lesson in the entire activity.

Communities can rebuild social capital. Neighbors can meet. Trust can grow. Relationships can be repaired. People can decide to become more engaged.

Someone can organize the block party, welcome the new family, check on the widow next door, start the conversation, or decide that instead of waiting for community to happen, they will help create it.

The Tower Is Really About People

The Social Capital Jenga instructions I have written begin with an important reminder: Healthy neighborhoods do not happen by accident. They are built one relationship at a time.

After spending hours thinking about blocks, colors, cards, rules and probabilities, I have become even more convinced of that statement.

We sometimes talk about strengthening communities as though it requires enormous initiatives, government programs or large amounts of money.

Those things can certainly help.

But much of the infrastructure of community is built through thousands of small human interactions that will never appear in a city budget. Things like a wave, a conversation, an invitation, a shared meal or a small act of kindness.

One act of neighboring does not look like much. But put enough of them together and you have something capable of carrying considerable weight.

And perhaps that is the biggest lesson from Social Capital Jenga: If communities can be weakened one small piece at a time, they can also be strengthened one small piece at a time.

The question I plan to ask participants after their neighborhood tower crashes may be the question worth asking all of us: If you could add one block of social capital to your neighborhood tomorrow, what would you do?

And yes, I am available to lead workshops around this game and the discussion that cards create.

WRITTEN BY

David L. Burton

For more information, visit the Engaged Neighbor website. Take our pledge and become part of a movement! Or subscribe to our newsletter. Access some of the research documents written by David Burton, the author of this blog. Or better yet, purchase one of his books off Amazon. Contact David L. Burton via email at dburton541@yahoo.