Closing the Opportunity Gap: An Evening With Dr. Robert Putnam, July 21

CLOSING THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

An Evening with Dr. Robert Putnam,
Author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

July 21^st | 7:30 pm | The Bushnell

Use the event code: PUTNAM

Across Connecticut’s cities and suburbs, more and more working families can’t seem to better their situation. Why is that?

It’s because these families are missing much more than material wealth: They lack the critical opportunities that would help them overcome hardships and advance.

Across America, the opportunity gap is widening.

Families with means are able to invest in high-quality childcare and enriching sports and clubs. They read more to their children, help them with homework, and in hundreds of large and small ways, they try to pave the way for their children’s success.

But too many children in Connecticut lack the opportunity—in the form of experiences and relationships—that empower them to take control of their own future. And when they make mistakes, as all children do, there are no “airbags” to protect them and help minimize the damage.

Without opportunity, children have little hope of overcoming the terrible isolation, obstruction and exclusion of poverty.

If we maintain the status quo, poverty will increasingly erode and divide our communities and economy, now and for generations to come. And it will cost us all—higher taxes, more people in jail, a shrinking skilled workforce, and so on.

But there is hope. And there is something you can do.

For Connecticut to break the cycle and cost of poverty, we must better understand the problem and work together to give all children the opportunities they need to succeed.

Join a conversation to motivate community action.

On July 21^st, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving invites you to The Bushnell for an evening with Dr. Robert Putnam, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.

We will learn how the opportunity gap affects our kids, what it costs our communities, and how we can work together to close it.

We need business and community leaders, policy makers and parents, and all those willing to be mentors and good neighbors to attend. We need to work Together for Good.

Use the event code: PUTNAM

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. Professor Putnam is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the British Academy. In 2006, he received the Skytte Prize, the world’s highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2012, he received the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities. Educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has written fourteen previous books, including the prize-winning American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us and the bestselling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community.

Putnam has been consulted by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, as well as national leaders from Britain, France, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Ireland, Australia, and elsewhere, and grassroots activists around the world. The Sunday Times of London has called him “the most influential academic in the world.” He lives in Jaffrey, New Hampshire and Cambridge, Massachusetts.