Sense of Responsible Togetherness, Community Trust, and Civic Engagement: Which Relationships with Community Members’ Hope?

In modern local communities, individualist tendencies and private interest are always more widespread at the expense of shared values and collective actions aimed at common well-being and benefits. This makes individuals focus on their daily issues as if they were solely private, without framing them in the wider social context they are embedded in, producing decreases in their hope about future opportunities. In the face of this, making people aware about their power to better their community through taking responsibilities for themselves and for others and enhancing their positive expectations about current and future opportunities available in it could represent strategies to rely on to produce a shift towards a less individualist perspective. Indeed, through this community members’ hope for their future and their willingness to engage for their community could increase, producing a different way of living local communities and daily issues. Consistently, this study, involving 594 Italian citizens, aimed at disentangling whether community members’ Sense of Responsible Togetherness (SoRT) and Community Trust associated with higher hope and which role their civic engagement behaviors had in these relationships. The data have been analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. What emerged showed that both SoRT and Community Trust were significant direct predictors of community members’ non-spiritual hope and showed a significant indirect effect on their spiritual one via their civic engagement behaviors. The latter did not show significant relationship with their non-spiritual hope. The implications deriving from these results will be discussed.