The Finding
Of the 14 research reports released in 2025, there were a lot of key findings. The Utah Foundation’s Board of Directors selected the top 10. In 4th place:
“Utah still leads the nation in terms of community life – and it isn’t even close. Utah is almost twice that of the next nearest state.”
The Details
The Utah Foundation’s Social Capital Index project is a series of reports that measure whether Utah is thriving in terms of its “social capital.” Put simply, social capital refers to the ways in which individuals can leverage connections between people and social networks for the benefit of themselves or their community. One of the seven project categories is social community life. The Utah Foundation uses eight indicators to compare states in terms of community life:
- Charitable donations (1st in the nation)
- Volunteerism (1st)
- Religious participation (2nd)
- Neighborhood participation (1st)
- Non-professional organizations funding effort (47th)
- Professional associations funding effort (39th)
- Spending time with friends and neighbors (38th)
- Spending time alone (2nd lowest in the nation)
Utah tops the list with three measures – and by a long margin. Those, along with the two second-place rankings, puts Utah far above the other states.
That said, Utah’s community life index score has fallen by over 40% since 2013.
The Background
Read more about this finding in its full report here.
And learn more about social capital here.
And here is the full Social Capital Index series.
Coming Up
Learn about the other nine top findings from 2025 in our Significant Statistics blog posts.
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