Picture a community that, by aggregate measures, appears to be doing well. Its workforce centers are meeting performance metrics. The social safety net and human services offices have committed, thoughtful leadership and caring front line staff and practitioners.
The local Continuum of Care wins competitive funding year after year. Foundations are engaged, and strong nonprofits have deep roots in the neighborhoods they serve.
Now picture a mother who receives public benefits who wants training and education that could lead to a better-paying job while ensuring that all her family’s needs are met. Or a man staying in a shelter who has worked before and wants to work again and move into an apartment of his own. Each of them can walk into any one of those strong institutions and still not find a path that holds together and a sequence of services that ensures they don’t fall through the cracks.
Every individual part of the system may be working. The whole is not.
This is one of the most persistent patterns we see and one of the least named: institutional strength and ecosystem capacity are not the same thing.
A community can have strong organizations, well-designed programs, capable public systems, and meaningful resources, and still lack the connective architecture that encourages that capacity to work
together. When that architecture is missing, the people with the most at stake fall through the seams between systems.
Evergreen Truths about Ecosystems
Over the last 15 years, I have engaged people working on the inside of various public systems – like workforce development centers, public benefits offices, and homeless services systems.
Collectively, I’ve talked with hundreds of stakeholders such as public system administrators, planners, front line staff, system users, and advocates to understand what happens in times of change, transition, and crisis at the integration layer between and across systems.
As a team at The Intersect, we’ve closely studied how networks and ecosystems are designed and move, what community-level hardship data reveals an ecosystem’s actual success, and the stories leaders, funders, and others tell about their ecosystem and people seeking services.
The research continues to point to evergreen truths:
- The ingredients for success may be present in individual systems. Together, however, they may quietly discourage individual systems from working together and investing in the same person seeking services.
- Capacity and resources exist, but fragmentation holds success back.
- Systems can appear rational, compliant, and legitimate. And they can still produce harm to individuals caught in the seam between systems.
- Alignment must take into consideration multiple layers of accountability, trust, capacity, power, and institutional realities.
- Communities and the people most affected by systems are too often outside the governance structures determining priorities, resources, implementation, and accountability.
Why it so often goes unbuilt
If connective infrastructure matters this much, why is it so often missing?
- It belongs to no one. Every institution is accountable for its own mission, its own budget, and its own metrics. The space between institutions has no owner, so the work of building connective tissue is always someone’s second priority.
- We measure the parts, not the whole. Public systems report on their own performance measures. Funders evaluate grantees one organization at a time. Almost no one is asked to report on whether the ecosystem as a whole is operating for the whole person.
- Funding follows organizations, not connections. It is far easier to fund a program than a governance table, multi-year system alignment, or invest in multi-partner ecosystem accountability. Yet my research says that this what pays off in the long run.
Building ecosystem capacity deliberately
As Dr. Traci Rivera elevated last month: the conditions reshaping communities are not waiting on the horizon. They are already here.
Too often our default response to transition, change, and crisis is to strengthen the parts of a system: fund another program, build another organization’s capacity, launch another initiative. But when the problem lies
between institutions, strengthening any one of them will not solve the integration layer between them.
The good news is that connective infrastructure can be designed. It requires leaders to examine the spaces between institutions as seriously as they consider institutions themselves.
Ask yourself:
- Whose voices are shaping the architecture between systems?
- Where do we have discretion to build differently in the seams, and how do we leverage it?
- Which investments strengthen connections, not just organizations?
- Where are our systems structurally misaligned?
- Who holds the boundary between systems?
- Where does our power sit?
As our research continues to elevate, it is the space between that matters. Designing differently requires minding it.