By Danielle LeCourt, Partnership Communications and Narrative Director

U.S. News & World Report recently named Utah the best state in the nation for the fourth consecutive year. This particular ranking draws on 71 metrics organized into eight broad categories: education, health care, the economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, crime and corrections, and the natural environment. Rankings can be a tricky business, and no one ranking can fully capture how a state or its residents are doing.  

But there is something interesting about how Utah reached the top of this list. The Beehive State didn’t dominate any single category, it simply performed consistently well across all of them. 

Economist Phil Dean offered one explanation for that consistency. Utah’s “secret sauce,” he said, is its social cohesion—the networks of relationships and connections that help people work together. 

But calling something a secret sauce leaves an obvious question: How, exactly, is the sauce made? When presented like this, social cohesion can sound more like a fixed cultural trait than a thing intentionally created by people. A noun instead of a verb.  

These three examples across Promise Partnership Utah (PPU) suggest there may be a case for the latter. 

Community Schools in Granite School District

At Wilson Elementary in South Salt Lake, the days before school breaks didn’t always bring the excitement Christi Christensen expected. Some students dreaded those breaks. 

“At school, students could count on breakfast and lunch,” she remembered. “Over a long weekend or holiday break, some were left unsure where their meals would come from.” Christi remembers students asking how long the break would last and when they could come back to school. “That really struck me,” she recalled. 

Christi had come to Wilson as principal with a clear assignment. Under Utah’s school grading system at the time, Wilson had received an F. Her charge was to improve student learning. 

Improving student learning, Christi found, sometimes meant solving problems that had little to do with instruction. Students needed food, clothing, glasses, dental care and other support the school couldn’tprovide alone. So she started knocking on doors, making calls, and inviting people in. 

“Once I started asking, I realized that the community would move heaven and earth to help out,” Christi said. So, the bowling alley across the street started hosting sixth graders for field trips. Police officers came to eat lunch with students to build a sense of safety. Businesses donated meals, and community organizations helped families find other resources the school couldn’t provide. 

Christi didn’t know it at the time, but she was building a community school, one relationship at a time. 

Today, as Director of Community Schools for Granite School District, her job is to make that process less dependent on someone hustling as hard as she did. Community school coordinators build relationships with families and partners and coordinate resources so principals don’t have to hold the network together themselves. 

“Principals shouldn’t have to do that,” Christi said. “There should be a system in place.” 

Housing in South Salt Lake

When a private donor offered funding to improve homes in South Salt Lake, Promise South Salt Lake could have built a new home repair program. Instead, it found a partner close to home, Habitat for Humanity, which already had that particular expertise and infrastructure in place. By combining the donor’s funding with Habitat’s existing home repair program, the partners could stretch those resources further and reach more homes. 

And this collaboration goes beyond home repairs. In an ongoing effort, the city purchased properties and is partnering with Habitat who will turn them into homes, with Habitat handling the construction and rehabilitation. Promise South Salt Lake, meanwhile, works with residents by offering homebuyer education, financial literacy, and debt-reduction courses, and by helping families prepare for homeownership. 

“We’re not the experts in housing itself,” explained Edward Lopez with Promise South Salt Lake. “What we are the experts in is the people and partnerships part.” 

That coordination can make a complicated system much simpler for residents. In one recent case, a city employee noticed that a home needed repairs and connected the homeowner with Promise South Salt Lake. Staff helped with the Habitat application, and Habitat completed the repairs. 

Sharing responsibility for South Salt Lake’s housing needs also changes how partners think about resources. Instead of competing to bring funding into their own organizations, each organization can ask who is best positioned to put it to work. When another housing grant became available, for example, Promise South Salt Lake encouraged Habitat to pursue it and offered its support. The goal wasn’t to grow any one organization, but to increase what the community could accomplish together. 

Building a Village in Moab 

On a farm in Moab, preschoolers learn and play alongside a community garden. A local birth educator teaches prenatal classes. A domestic violence organization teaches children about body safety. Utah State University Extension holds workshops in the orchard. Another partner grows potatoes on the property that are distributed in the community and to the Navajo Nation. 

More than 30 community partners now participate in Our Village Community Center, but it didn’t start that way. 

In 2008, Annie Watts Thomas helped create a small nature-based preschool at the Youth Garden Project. At the time, Moab had few programs for very young children, and Annie was raising three young daughters herself. The idea began with preschool, but Annie kept noticing other things families needed—and finding people who could help. 

“All of it came from a need as a mother,” Annie recalled. A need would surface—sometimes in her own family, sometimes in another—and they would look for a way to meet it. “We would just bring those resources or programs as we went.” 

Need by need and partner by partner, the village grew. What began as an early childhood effort eventually became what Annie now describes as a “prevention ecosystem” stretching “from birth to hospice.” For Annie, that full span of life matters. Older children mentor younger ones. Parents contribute. Elders remain “active and contributing.” People can need the village at one stage of life and help provide it at another. 

Our Village, then, isn’t one organization providing support to everyone else. It draws on the people around it, creating more ways for them to contribute to one another. “There are genuine limitations,” Annie said. “I cannot do this by myself.” 

And in a community built this way, no one else has to do it by themselves, either. 

Taken together, these examples make Utah’s “secret sauce” a little less mysterious. Granite School District is building the work of connecting people into its schools. In South Salt Lake, partners are sharing responsibility for housing and directing resources toward whoever is best positioned to use them. And in Moab, more people are finding ways to contribute to the community around them. 

Across these communities, people have intentionally built ways of working that make connection and collaboration easier. And perhaps that’s one of the most useful lessons buried inside this ranking. Because social cohesion isn’t simply something we have, it’s something we repeatedly do.