Best-selling author David Brooks was asked what he would do if he had a billion dollars to give. In his recent NY Times op-ed piece, he answers: “Only loving relationships transform lives, and such relationships can be formed only in small groups. I’d seed 25-person collectives, a group of people who meet once a week to share…Each collective would have a curriculum, a set of biographical and reflective readings, to help members come up with their own life philosophies, to help them master the intellectual [foundation of] virtues.” In this piece, Nipun Mehta shares that ServiceSpace (DailyGood’s umbrella organization) has been successfully running on this core principle since 1999 without fundraising a single penny. He challenges the currently prevailing view that financial capital is the solution to social problems and urges us to consider the other forms of capital that are often underutilized and overlooked. “We need to repair the social fabric,” Nipun shares, “without which all other solutions are patch work.”
