A philanthropic agenda for opportunity and community flourishing.
Americans’ daily lives have quietly narrowed since the pandemic. We move between home and work but spend far less time in the informal spaces in between. The places where people once lingered, talked, and got to know one another—coffee shops, parks, libraries, recreation centers, diners, church basements, and barbershops—are used less often or have disappeared altogether.
Ray Oldenburg described these settings in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, calling them “third places.” He argued that they are vessels of friendship, citizenship, and the everyday practice of pluralism. They also shape how people connect across income lines, how opportunity travels, and how young people envision their futures.
For foundations and donors focused on opportunity, belonging, and civic health, third places deserve renewed attention, not only as amenities but as essential community infrastructure.
National surveys confirm how much these spaces have shrunk. The American Social Capital Survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life reports that roughly half of Americans rarely visited a park in the past year. Large majorities seldom go to libraries or community centers, especially in low-income and rural communities. There are simply too few places where people can gather without an invitation or membership.
Declining usage is only part of the story. In many communities, third places have physically disappeared entirely. For example, independent retail and service businesses that often serve as community gathering spots have vanished. Retail analysts projected up to 15,000 U.S. store closures in 2025, with closures far outpacing openings and more than 7,300 brick-and-mortar locations shutting in 2024 alone. Membership in many local civic and fraternal organizations has also waned, with lodges and clubs that once anchored neighborhoods shrinking or closing entirely.
So, why have third places declined?
Several long-running forces have converged. Economic consolidation has squeezed small, locally owned establishments. Rising commercial rents have made low-margin gathering spaces harder to sustain. The shift to digital life has moved interaction online, weakening habits of in-person gathering. Longer commutes and more fragmented schedules leave less discretionary time. And the pandemic accelerated these trends, pushing many already fragile institutions past the breaking point.
These combined trends make clear that the erosion of third places is not merely behavioral. It is structural.
This matters because third places are where social life happens without planning. You run into people you didn’t expect to see. You overhear conversations that broaden your view. You pick up small but useful bits of information about job openings, training programs, school options, and local events. These interactions rarely feel consequential in the moment, but they quietly shape lives.
One of the most important roles third places play is bringing together people who would otherwise live in separate social worlds. Families of different incomes may not work together, worship together, or live on the same block. But they can share a park bench, a library table, or a neighborhood café.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights underscore why this matters. Studying children who grew up in neighborhoods rebuilt under the federal HOPE VI housing program, researchers found that kids did better later in life, not mainly because buildings improved, but because neighborhoods became more economically mixed. Children were more likely to interact with higher-income neighbors. Those everyday interactions exposed them to different expectations, information, and possibilities.
In plain terms, knowing people from different walks of life helped open doors. Third places are among the few settings where these cross-class relationships can form naturally. They do not force interaction. They make it possible.
Not all relationships are created equal when it comes to expanding opportunity. Counterintuitively, it is often our weak ties—the looser acquaintances and peripheral connections in our networks—that open the door to new jobs and new information, rather than our closest friends and family. Sociologist Mark Granovetter first identified this dynamic in his classic 1973 article, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”
He showed that people we interact with casually tend to move in different circles and discover opportunities outside our usual networks. These weak ties act as bridges to information, institutions, and employment leads we would not otherwise encounter. By contrast, strong ties with family members and close friends provide emotional support and belonging but typically inhabit the same information space we do. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant puts it, “Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges. They provide more efficient access to new information.”
This distinction helps explain why third places matter so much. They support close relationships while also fostering broader, looser connections that link people across income, occupation, and background. When third places disappear, communities lose not just gathering spots, but the everyday pathways through which opportunity quietly travels.
Third places also matter more practically: they connect learning to work.
Many job opportunities do not move through formal channels. They travel through conversation when someone mentions an opening, a training program, an apprenticeship, or a local employer who is hiring. For young people especially, these informal exchanges can be the difference between feeling stuck and seeing a next step.
For youth who lack strong professional networks at home, third places can serve as informal bridges to the world of work, connecting them to adults, institutions, and pathways they might not otherwise encounter.
How do we rebuild these essential institutions?
Public funding alone will not rebuild the social infrastructure of third places. Private markets often undervalue spaces that generate social returns but modest financial returns. This is precisely where philanthropy has a comparative advantage. It can absorb risk, support experimentation, and invest in social goods that markets underprovide.
Third places sit at the intersection of donor priorities: education, workforce development, mental health, youth outcomes, and civic engagement. They do not replace targeted programs; they strengthen the environment those programs depend on.
For philanthropy, the strategic question is not whether third places matter. It is how to invest in them in ways that deliberately increase connection, exposure, and opportunity.
Here are six practical ways donors can help revive third places and the relationships they foster:
- Invest in spaces where people can linger. Support upgrades like seating, lighting, Wi-Fi, and flexible rooms that make libraries, parks, and community centers places people want to stay.
- Bring people together. Small grants for book clubs, music nights, repair cafés, community meals, and intergenerational activities can activate underused spaces.
- Reuse underused buildings as community hubs. Vacant storefronts, closed schools, and empty lots can become shared gathering spaces with modest philanthropic seed funding.
- Design for inclusion from the start. Support accessibility improvements, outreach, and community hosts so spaces feel welcoming across income and age lines.
- Link third places to youth opportunity and work. Fund after-hours access, mentoring partnerships, and programs that expose young people to adults and pathways beyond their immediate circles.
- Foster weak-tie relationships. Support spaces and programs that deliberately increase weak-tie interactions—settings where people from different backgrounds regularly encounter one another and exchange information.
Third places are more than quaint local spots. They are the foundations of civic life where friendships form, ideas circulate, and belonging takes root. The retreat from these spaces over the past decade has coincided with rising loneliness, fractured social ties, and civic disengagement.
Foundations and donors have a unique opportunity to reframe third places from optional amenities to essential social infrastructure. Investments that enhance physical spaces, support programming, promote inclusion, and influence public policy can catalyze durable improvements in community well-being.
The evidence is clear. When people have accessible places to gather regularly, their sense of belonging, health, and civic engagement increase. For philanthropy, there may be no more important goal than helping communities reclaim the simple art of being together.
Bruno V. Manno is a senior adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute and leads its Pathways to Opportunity What Works Lab. He is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy, a Senior Associate in Education at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and a Senior Advisor for K-12 Education at the Walton Family Foundation. Follow him on LinkedIn.
