Social capital refers to the networks of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation that develop between people within a community, built up through repeated positive interaction rather than being something that can be created quickly or imposed from outside, a factor that should not be underestimated, even though it rarely makes headlines.
Communities with higher levels of social capital tend to find it easier to organise collective responses to shared challenges, since existing relationships and trust reduce the effort needed to coordinate action when a genuine need arises, which is precisely why it is worth explaining clearly, which tends to matter most in a genuine crisis.
Because social capital develops gradually through sustained everyday interaction, activities that bring people together repeatedly, from local clubs to volunteer groups, are often valued as much for building this underlying connection as for their immediate stated purpose, a distinction that carries real practical weight, as later developments often go on to show.