Organizational infrastructure and community capacity: The role of broker organizations

Over the past decade or so, there has been a significant renewed emphasis on community-based approaches to promoting social change and economic development, delivering services, and addressing the needs of people in poverty. One way in which such efforts strategically address this goal is by focusing on the organizational infrastructure of a community, seeking to change the ways that individual community-serving organizations relate to one another and to organizations and actors beyond the community. This paper focuses on one approach to this task: the establishment of broker organizations — local intermediaries responsible for fostering and convening partnerships and networks of relations among existing organizations. It briefly outlines the impetus and rationale for engaging in interorganizational relationships in this context, defines and explores the role of broker organizations as they have played out in a few illustrative cases, and distills some of the central issues that emerge regarding their promise and limitations.