Mere shared bowling league membership can create bonds deep enough for organ donation

Evidence

BEFORE OCTOBER 29, 1997, John Lambert and Andy Boschma knew each other only through their local bowling league at the Ypsi-Arbor Lanes in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Lambert, a sixty-four-year-old retired employee of the University of Michigan hospital, had been on a kidney transplant waiting list for three years when Boschma, a thirty-three-year-old accountant, learned casually of Lambert’s need and unexpectedly approached him to offer to donate one of his own kidneys. … That they bowled together made all the difference. In small ways like this—and in larger ways, too—we Americans need to reconnect with one another. That is the simple argument of this book. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 72

Categorization

• SHARE: A vivid concrete opener for anyone following social-cohesion debates.
• XREF: Connects to the shared-project mechanism the reader is researching, plus Putnam’s own framing in his earlier essays. — connects to: Bowling Alone functioned as a communitarian antidote to post-1989 liberalism

Broader Connections

• Bowling Alone functioned as a communitarian antidote to post-1989 liberalism #exemplifies (0.85)