You depart from here in many directions to the four winds and the seven seas. A wide variety of careers await you, but whatever you do, each of you will live somewhere in a community, among neighbors. With more knowledge and understanding of social relations and human groups than most, you may be in a better position to contribute to the betterment of the community where you live.

I say this because along with a growing number of people, I believe there is a great need to revive and strengthen our civic institutions. As I see it, there is a need for social inventors. We are used to thinking of inventors as people who make mechanical gadgets. Get over it and start thinking of the inventor as one who improves the social machinery on which so much depends.

Back in about 1962 when I was a graduate student, I wrote a little essay entitled, “Urban Man’s Predicament: A Diagnosis,” I which I said that the growth of ever-larger bureaucracies in both business and government, and the shift from local to state to national and international control of decisions had left an emptiness in the local community. Control was gone somewhere else and the locality had become little more than a victim of outside forces. I wondered then and for all the years since then, can we learn how to continually renew and replace the local social order that is being destroyed by these forces?

Later on, when I came to Stony Brook I found a situation, not of decaying civil society but of a raw frontier where there had never been any organizations and they all had to be developed. While serving on the board of the Faculty-Student Association, I proposed and obtained support for an award for students’ contributions to the quality of campus life. Early rewards that come to mind were for formation of the squash team, the ambulance corps, a lounge for older returning students to meet in mutual support, a system for recording and keeping on file student musical recitals in Staller Center, and, oh yes, the painting of the zebra stripes on the walk west of the library. The award has continued, and students still earn recognition for adding to the richness and details of campus life. As Stony Brook students, you have had the benefit of many such innovations by others before you who saw a need and set about to fill it.

Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe in the 1980's people came to realize that centralized government control and big state-owned industries were not delivering the good life that had been promised. A civil society movement began, to build voluntary associations and free enterprises.

Today in America, while the economy roars ahead, profits soar and there is full employment, and while we have the benefits of a stable democracy, there is still the fact that the benefits are not reaching all of our communities and all of our people equitably. In reaction to this fact, a civil society movement is quietly getting under way here as well.

The basic argument of the civil society movement leaders is that government and the market are two legs of a three-legged stool. The other leg is civil society, consisting of voluntary associations, non-profit organizations, religious institutions and the like. If these leaders are right about the need to revitalize local citizen groups, there is going to be an explosion of demands for more civic organizations. This means that you as graduates in sociology are entering a world of opportunities in which you hold a special advantage--not so much in government or business but in the voluntary and non-profit world where the primary resources are not power, not wealth but the talents and dedication of the people themselves.

In tune with this emerging trend, the sociology graduation speakers in recent years have been entrepreneurs of faith-based, volunteer and non-profit groups. In 1997, The Reverend Francis Pizzarelli told how he developed Hope House Ministries. In 1998, Robert J. Mulvey reported his efforts to build a service to help civic groups improve their neighborhoods. In 1999, Diane Arens, a Stony Brook sociology alumnus, told us how she had organized a successful housing agency.

This year is no exception. Your speaker is still another adventurer in the world of civic organization. I have joined with Bob Mulvey and others to set up a non-profit operation called New Directions Community-Based Research Institute, which will raise funds to enable us to work with civic groups that want to build better neighborhoods and communities.

With New Directions we have to think carefully about each piece of our business because it hasn’t been done before. Then we have to try things and change them and try again. Oh yes, we can borrow some ideas from others who have done related work, but it is hard to find any previous examples of an institute that adopts civic associations as clients, obtains grants to enable it to work with them and enlists the expertise of appropriate professionals and faculty and students of local colleges to conduct research and develop the information requested by the civic association.

First we intend to provide the information that the civic group requires. Then we guide them in assessing their needs and setting priorities. Next we get them together with people who have the expertise to make plans, and finally we coach them as they carry out the plan in partnership with local government and industry.

Along the way, more innovations will be needed. In Mount Sinai, where the urgent drive of the civic association is to establish a central park before all the farmland is built on, we are bringing in the idea of a community land trust to acquire and manage the park.

In a Central Islip neighborhood where there are a large number of vacant and boarded-up houses, the invention was a venture called Neighborhood Realty Services, which would combine a local non-profit agency with a commercial real estate firm in service to the neighborhood. The non-profit agency backed out of the deal, but now we have the design available in case it is needed somewhere else.

What I’m finding, out there, is virtually a new frontier, one where we in sociology have a particular advantage because the need is for the ability to organize people. I hope you will keep this in mind as you get started earning a living or go on to graduate school. Whether you enter the world of civil society as an employer or as an employee or as a volunteer, think about how you might help to make your organization better informed, more representative of the community, more inclined toward cooperative problem-solving instead of arguing and complaining, and with an emphasis on seeing projects through to completion.

Watch for the opportunities, and sooner or later you, too may become a civic inventor and innovator. I have seen students like you do it over and over again right here on campus, and there is no reason why you cannot continue to do it out there in the larger world. When you do, please drop me a note. I’ll love to hear about it!