Mighty neighborly

Joseph Porcelli was sick of learning about people getting mugged as they departed the Orange Line's Stony Brook station near his home in Jamaica Plain. So back in August 2004, the longtime DJ approached his neighbors and asked them to stand watch, every night, on the front porch.

By summer's end, he said, two things had happened: The muggings stopped, and the group wound up becoming pretty good friends.

Porcelli thought he had hit upon a connection between being social and decreasing crime. He started Neighbors for Neighbors, JP, in which nearly 1,200 residents are trying to create a better, safer community by encouraging neighbors to be, well, neighborly.

Porcelli's efforts are part of an unofficial movement in Dorchester, Allston-Brighton, Woburn, and across the United States, in which people are trying out a theory popularized by a Harvard professor whose research on social capital in part shows that neighbors who know each other tend to live longer, be happier, and stand a better chance of building a community where crime is less common.

``There wasn't anything wrong with the community, but people weren't connected," said Porcelli, who also worked as a software developer before recently taking a job with the Neighborhood Crime Watch unit of the Boston Police Department. ``The point is to get people who don't know each other to know each other, so we continually build community."

He launched neighborhood socials, which have grown in size to include some 215 Jamaica Plain residents who use the website, www.neighborsforneighbors.org, as a starting point to connecting in real life. At the gatherings, residents from gardeners to lawyers chat while signing up for cooking, painting murals, cleaning graffiti, and other activities that help the community and give members reasons to get together. In theory, organizers say, these activities are the building blocks of friendship.

Porcelli estimates that his group completed some 718 hours of social projects and volunteering in 2004 and 2005.

In Dorchester, the leaders of SCI Dorchester are finishing their second year of building better relationships in Boston's largest neighborhood, which is struggling to overcome violent crime in several areas. The area doesn't lack social capital, said SCI Dorchester director Marisa Coleman, but Dorchester's size makes it difficult for people to connect.

SCI sends a weekly e-mail of events to 1,000 residents, so the folks in Fields Corner , for example, know about the Ashmont bake sale. Another program teaches teenagers how to be tour guides, which bolsters pride in the neighborhood while giving teenagers a reason to work together, all efforts that Social Capital Inc. founder David Crowley hopes will create better connections and possibly stem misunderstandings that can lead to shootings.

Crowley created SCI Woburn after reading ``Bowling Alone," written by Harvard professor Robert Putnam. Crowley wanted to rebuild the community Putnam said had shrunk over the years. SCI also has designs for Lynn, he said.

``Roughly half of the people answered a survey saying they'd like to be more involved in their communities," said Crowley, who measures social capital in part by asking Dorchester residents whether they know the people on their block. ``They have a general desire to be more connected, but don't necessarily know how to go there from here."

In Allston, community activist Harry Mattison is meeting with Porcelli to map out how to bring the concept to his neighborhood. A large number of college students and transient adults makes it difficult for everyone to be on the same page, he said.

``There's a lot of diversity in our neighborhood, which is great and gives character, but also makes it harder to get to know your neighbor if they speak a different language or if you have people raising young families mixed with older people" Mattison said.

The volunteer aspects of the Boston groups fall in line with research by the Corporation for National and Community Service, where chief executive officer David Eisner has found a correlation between increased social capital and volunteer service.

``They volunteer because they're most likely to find people who care about the same things they care about and are willing to do something about it," he said.

It's difficult to scientifically prove a correlation between a drop in crime and the visibility of neighbors, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. However, he said, people who care about their neighborhood can help deter criminals.

``Criminals are much more apt to prey on a neighborhood if they have the sense that no one cares," said Fox. ``When a community bands together in common concern, it can send the message that we're united and not tolerant."

This fall, the federal government will start measuring social capital in US cities, joining the efforts of countries such as Ireland and Australia, said Harvard professor Thomas Sander, who worked with Putnam and is executive director of Harvard University's Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America.

He's not surprised that a transitional neighborhood such as Jamaica Plain would have large numbers of people with a desire to connect.

``They've been able to turn what originally was socializing for some explicit goal, like keeping the neighborhood safe, to now just socializing for the sake of getting to know their neighbors," Sander said. ``What's unusual in this is that they found a mechanism to keep people involved after the threat has gone."