The term "capital" is often associated with purely economic ideas of profit, efficiency, and material wealth. Gaudiani challenges us to see the notion of "capital" in a larger context as something that adds value to the well-being of a community.

For two hundred years, since the Industrial Revolution, we have spent capital to build societies. Through the 1950s, capital meant only cash. In the 1960s, economists urged us to treat "human capital" as an asset to be nurtured for profit. In the 1980s, sociologists noted that communities needed "social capital," or a sense of belonging. In the mid-1990s, Lester Thurow declared that knowledge, or "intellectual capital," was a community's most important resource.

But this vision was still incomplete. We had overlooked the most important kind of capital, the kind that underlies communities just as a foundation keeps a great building from toppling. This fourth form is wisdom capital - the available store of thought collected over thousands of years that calls us to live in ways that sustain the well-being of others. In a time of growing change and complexity, without wisdom capital and the values it sustains, we cannot have strong and healthy communities.

Wisdom capital is not dispensed by any treasury. It is the product of wisdom traditions where it is still vital. Those traditions are handed down through stories retold from age to age, whether written or unwritten. They are stored in texts like the Bible, the Koran, the I Ching, and the writings of Confucius, Plato and others.

Uninformed by the wisdom tradition, data, information, knowledge, intellect, expertise, strategies, and even family or social groups can be organized to exploit, degrade, or violate. Wisdom capital is a community's common ground. It is the basis for negotiating the goals of individuals vs. the community. It leads to trust, respect, and commitment to work together within and among communities.

A few suggestions for building wisdom traditions and applying them to our lives:

- Cynicism is the great enemy of future communities. Make every sacrifice necessary, both in good times and bad, to sustain community members’ faith in the core values found in the wisdom tradition.

- Make learning and teaching an ongoing part of the community's life. Develop opportunities for the community to learn and develop wisdom traditions as expressed in diverse cultures. Give community members the chance to express their own personal relationships to and experiences with the traditions, and to share these with each other.

- Create teams to document and teach local history in interesting ways, using the expertise of local historians, village elders, and storytellers.

  Facilitate the development of communication skills like conflict negotiation and mediation, listening, collaboration, and team building among all members of the community. *