Ideas

Across the country, local communities are being asked to take on increasingly complex challenges — improving public health, advancing equitable economic development, addressing public safety, and confronting structural inequities. Yet too often, we respond with short-term programs and funding cycles while overlooking the most critical ingredient for sustained change: community capacity.

If “it takes a village,” the real question is: Is the village ready and able to do the work?

The answer depends on whether a community capacity building infrastructure is in place — an ecosystem of supports, relationships, and institutions that enables residents, organizations, and systems to work together effectively over time. Central to this ecosystem are organizations that support community leadership that can engage decisionmakers and hold them accountable (see Power-building Ecosystem Framework published by USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity).

What Is Community Capacity?
Community capacity is the ability of a community to identify challenges, leverage its strengths, mobilize resources, work together, and create lasting change, as Kien Lee defined in her blog, What Makes Community Capacity the Foundation of Equitable Lasting Change. Community capacity is what turns “a program that happened” into “a community that can keep solving problems.” It is built on knowledge, skills, resources, relationships, and collective efficacy, and is expressed through a community’s ability to advocate, collaborate, mobilize action, build leadership, and address structural inequities.

From Fragmentation to Infrastructure
For decades, community capacity building has quietly shifted in ways that have weakened long-term impact. Research and experience across public and private initiatives — albeit limited — show that support has become increasingly fragmented and short term.

Most efforts rely on initiative-specific capacity building, where training and technical assistance are tied to a particular grant or program and are often delivered by external consultants. While valuable in the moment, these supports are rarely sustained. Relationships dissolve, knowledge isn’t institutionalized, and communities are left to rebuild capacity again and again. Relatively few of these support the relationships they created beyond the life of the initiative. Even less is invested in sustaining or expanding the capacity that was built. The result is a cycle of repeated startup rather than cumulative progress.

This is not a failure of communities. It is a failure of how we design support.

Lasting change requires infrastructure — a system that sustains learning, strengthens relationships, mobilizes resources, and supports leadership over time. Community capacity is a function of relationships among organizations and the strength of the whole system.

The Infrastructure Is Underleveraged and Underdeveloped
Intermediary organizations have been a central part of community development and community capacity infrastructure for more than a century. The Cooperative Extension System (est. 1914) created a nationwide infrastructure to connect research and local communities. More recent examples include LISC (1979), NeighborWorks, and StriveTogether, all of which demonstrate the importance of sustained, locally grounded support systems.

A 2022 study by Community Science, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, identified 248 intermediary organizations across the 30 largest U.S. cities. These intermediaries support an average of 48 grassroots organizations each, with some supporting hundreds. They work on public safety, housing, economic opportunity, food access, public health, and social justice, providing leadership development, technical assistance, coalition building, and connections to funding and institutions. What is missing is not activity, but recognition, coordination, and sustained investment in this already robust community capacity building infrastructure.

What the Infrastructure Can Actually Do
A community capacity infrastructure can do the following:

• Develop leadership and expand who holds power;
• Provide tailored technical assistance;
• Strengthen participating organizations in their management and development;
• Support real-world problem solving;
• Connect organizations to resources and other needed relationships;
• Build networks and collaboration;
• Transform conflict and build community across different groups of people;
• Provide data for different purposes;
• Support continuous learning and adaptation;
• Expand participation and recognition; and
• Strengthen institutional capacity to partner with communities.

What This Looks Like Locally
To build this infrastructure locally, there must be:

• A culture of community engagement and action;
• Coordinated capacity building among intermediaries and other capacity building resources;
• Collaborative and strategic funding by public and philanthropic institutions; and
• Collective power building among grassroots organizations.

How to Get Started: From Idea to Action
Learn about the infrastructure that exists for building community capacity and bring your sector together to start thinking about it. Here are tips to begin.

1. Start where you are in the ecosystem (i.e., community organization leader, funder, intermediary or technical assistance provider, media outlet) and convene around it. Engage others in your part of the ecosystem to start the plan and assess the ecosystem and the strength of the existing infrastructure to guide the work.
2. Map what already exists, including intermediaries, technical assistance organizations, consultants, funding flows, networks, and other resources to build capacity that serves or could serve your community.
3. Once you have a clear picture of who should be involved and who could be part of the infrastructure, begin convening other key organizations and sectors mentioned previously (e.g., funders, intermediaries, community-based and grassroots groups, and local government, depending on the issue you plan to work on). Prioritize engaging leaders of community-led organizations and initiatives, especially if they have not yet been included. Use these convenings to build a shared understanding of the structure, gaps, and need, as well as the process required to develop a strong community capacity building infrastructure.
4. Consider engaging experienced designers and facilitators like Community Science (see companion blog How Community Science Partners with Communities to Build Lasting Capacity Infrastructure by Kien Lee).

These steps are critical for establishing the foundation for alignment, trust building, and long-term success.

Also, consider these tips for what to do:

Don’t take on every issue and everything all at once.

Focus on the issue at hand (e.g., housing, safety). This is a continuous process of improvement and capacity building without an “end.”

Don’t bring different types of organizations and leaders from the start.

Strengthen connections, understanding, and commitment within your sector first (e.g. community organizations, funders, nonprofit technical assistance providers).

Don’t let funding drive the decisionmaking, issues, or type of participants you engage.

The infrastructure needs to be community “owned” and not associated with a particular funder or initiative.

Don’t go beyond those working in your sector without first engaging resident leadership.
Don’t assume that everyone else needs their capacity developed.

Start with your organization or those in your sector.

Don’t assume you, your organization, or your community are ready — or willing and committed — to follow through after taking the first step.

Get your leadership behind this. False starts do more harm than good.

Don’t assume you can “wing it” as you go.

There’s a lot of experience and research out there to learn from, use it.

Look out for additional steps and lessons in Community Science’s April newsletter!

Advice for Funders: Overcoming Isolation and Advancing Community Capacity
Funders often face the same isolation as other stakeholders in community change efforts. Local collaboration is limited, and tensions between national and local funders can fragment efforts and reduce impact. Funding collaboratives offer a clear alternative. By pooling resources and aligning strategies, funders can expand impact, improve coordination, and take on complex challenges that no single organization can address alone. Collaboratives and intermediaries reduce the individual risk for funders as well, which can open the door to supporting more innovative or sensitive work.

Despite these advantages, some funders hesitate to invest in local intermediaries due to concerns about long-term dependency. But the real question is: Can lasting change occur without investing in the infrastructure that makes it possible? Most meaningful outcomes require sustained, multi-year commitment. To increase impact, funders can:

• Partner with local community and intermediary organizations to align funding with local priorities;
• Invest in the technical capacity needed to make changes and the operational capacity of implementing organizations — strong organizations are essential for strong results;
• Join or form funding collaboratives to coordinate resources and strategies;
• Integrate capacity building early — at the start of planning and funding decisions; and
• Commit to long-term support for building community capacity infrastructure.

Final Thought
Community capacity is not just about what communities have now. It’s about what they are able to do together over time. Building and sustaining community capacity infrastructure can feel daunting. There will be conflict and ongoing learning about what works and what doesn’t in each community. Developing and supporting the right talent is part of that challenge. But if we are serious about learning from the past and achieving better outcomes, we must focus on strengthening capacity and readiness to take on complex systems change efforts. Advancing well-being, especially for those experiencing disadvantage, requires a more intentional, sustained, and collective commitment to building this infrastructure.