Strong Towns BloNo will host a film screening this week about how the decline in social capital is eroding American communities.
The 2023 documentary Join or Die is based on Harvard University professor Robert Putnam’s landmark research connecting distrust and civil unrest with plummeting enrollment in clubs and other civic organizations—captured in his best-selling book Bowling Alone, published in 2000 as a follow-up to an essay first written in 1995.
Since their formation as the “Bloomington Revivalists” in 2022, Strong Towns BloNo [affiliated with a nationwide organization of the same name] has primarily focused on outside-the-box solutions for local issues like housing, city planning and transportation alternatives. So, a film about why you should join a club isn’t exactly in their milieu.
Except it is.
“We want this community to be a community of joiners,” said chapter president Noah Tang. “People who do things. People who go out and join clubs. People who think, ‘I can solve this problem,’ and not wait for other people to do things. I think it’s extremely important to talk about that.”
Thursday’s 7 p.m. screening at the Normal Theater is one way to facilitate that conversation. And those wearing swag repping their club or civic organization of choice receive free popcorn.
“The main thesis of this movie is, over the past 80 years or so, civic life in the United States has really gone downhill,” Tang said. “People stopped joining organizations like the Kiwanis, like Jaycees, like the Rotary.”
Bloomington-Normal has an abundance of such organizations—including not one, but six Rotary clubs—but they’ve not been immune to declining enrollment and an aging membership.
There are exceptions.
“I had a friend who is a bassist in an emo guitar band. They joined the Freemasons—at the age of like 24,” Tang said.
The Pub Club, a Rotary chapter that’s revised several conventions to suit a younger crowd, is Illinois’ fastest growing Rotary. And Tang himself, at just 28 and working as a teacher at Bloomington High School, is evidence that civic engagement is possible at any age.
Tang said the Twin Cities are "ahead of the curve" when it comes to civic engagement, but he thinks there's room for improvement.
“I truly believe there’s something for everyone,” he said. “From a Strong Towns perspective, you want to activate local citizens to truly care deeply about communities. How you do that is getting in groups, thinking about your communities and taking action—and that does require getting off the couch.”
