Communities are being asked to do more with less. Federal commitments are shrinking. Local needs are climbing. In that squeeze, a reasonable and well-intentioned question keeps surfacing: why not put every available dollar directly into community-based organizations and skip everything in between?

It is a fair question, and it deserves a better answer than the field has been giving.

For the past five years, I have been part of a group of practitioners trying to answer this question honestly. We lead national and regional place-based initiatives, and we started meeting informally after Jennifer Fassbender, with Invest Health, noticed we kept solving the same problems separately. That informal group became the Intermediary Learning Network (ILN), and Build Healthy Places Network, a program of the Public Health Institute, has been part of it since the beginning.

ILN recently released Building a Thriving Future, Together: Modern Intermediaries as Partners in Community Transformation. Most learning in our field stays locked inside a single organization’s evaluation. This report is unusual because twelve of us opened our books at once, across 26 initiatives and 2,352 sites, covering a decade of work and more than $312 million moved into neighborhoods between 2015 and 2025.

What gets lost when the pendulum swings too far

Direct investment in community-based organizations is essential. We would not argue otherwise, and neither does the report.

But when direct investment becomes the only strategy, real capacity goes missing. The report names two losses in particular. Investment stays limited to the reach of one organization rather than multiplying across a network. And funders lose sight of the wider ecosystem, the gaps, tensions, and openings that live between systems rather than inside any one of them. I would add a third from my own experience. Smaller communities lose fast access to what is already working somewhere else. Coalition building takes staff time that many places simply do not have, and finding a peer model, understanding it well enough to trust it, and adapting it to local conditions takes even more. That work of scanning and translating across places is often exactly what a regional or national partner is for.

The New Jersey example in the report makes the stakes concrete. Four city teams working as a network through Reinvestment Fund’s Building Healthier, More Equitable Communities initiative turned $4.68 million into roughly $98 million, a twenty-one-fold return. No single organization in that group could have produced that alone. The multiplier came from the coordination.

What a decade of practice taught us

The report distills what we learned into three commitments and five entry points.

The commitments are what we hold ourselves: to pursue change that lasts rather than outputs that are easy to count, build local capacity that survives individual grants and leaders, and resource networks rather than isolated organizations.

The entry points are how the work gets done starting from what communities already have, aligning partners around a shared vision, funding in ways that do not undercut the outcomes we say we want, treating belonging as foundational rather than nice to have, and shifting real decision-making power to communities.

Community-driven is a structure, not a sentiment

At BHPN, community-owned and community-driven approaches are non-negotiable. What makes this report useful is that its examples show what that looks like after the language runs out and the structure has to hold. Residents hold formal voting authority rather than advisory seats. Stipends treat lived expertise as expertise. Community members decide how public budgets get spent. Communities define the indicators by which success is measured.

Community Innovations for Racial Equity (CIRE), our Kresge-supported initiative with community development corporations, offers one example. Partners reported an 86 percent increase in their ability to support existing community assets and address priority needs through community-led and community-owned approaches. Working with Verge Impact Partners, CIRE partners co-developed frameworks for community-driven data collection and evaluation so  residents can shape the questions, define the indicators, and decide how findings get used.

Where this meets our next chapter

This report arrives as BHPN steps into a new strategic plan, and the overlap is hard to miss. Our commitments: data that builds community power, strengthen the movement across sectors rather than convening for its own sake, to deepen impact in place, and invest in the changemakers doing slow relational work all show up here as evidence from the field rather than as our own aspiration. The report also draws on the Vital Conditions for Health and Well-Being framework developed by The Rippel Foundation, the same lens we use to keep our work anchored in what everyone needs to thrive.

What we are asking of the field

• For funders: flexible, multi-year resources that fund collaboration, leadership, and learning, not only implementation. Relational work cannot be squeezed into a twelve-month reporting cycle.
• For practitioners: treat shared power as a core operating principle rather than a supplemental practice, and build it into governance, financing, data, and decision rights from the outset.
• For policymakers: institutionalize community voice through participatory budgeting, standing resident councils, and transparency requirements so community leadership outlasts funding cycles and administrations.

With gratitude

Thank you to Jennifer Fassbender, who convened this group and held it together with real generosity over five years, long before there was a report to show for it. Thank you to Jane Erickson and Cierra Bryant, and Bobby Milstein at The Rippel Foundation, who stewarded this work from start to finish. Thank you to Dr. Tiffany Manuel of TheCaseMade for naming why this moment matters.

The eight briefs were written by people who could have spent that time protecting their own initiatives and chose instead to compare notes honestly, including what did not work. Thank you to Lourdes Aceves and Sarah Weller Pegna at the National League of Cities, Somava Saha and Jonathan Scaccia at Well-being and Equity (WE) in the World, Rick Brush at Wellville, Melissa Monbouquette at The BUILD Health Challenge and the de Beaumont Foundation, Rebecca Johnson at ChangeLab Solutions, Rea Pañares at the California Accountable Communities for Health Initiative, and Romi Hall at the Center for Community Investment, Mary Ayala at Enterprise Community Partners, Melissa M. Jones at Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative, Tamar Kotelchuck at the Working Cities Challenge, and Paul Singh at NeighborWorks America.

Most of all, thank you to the hundreds of communities across the country that we continue to learn with every day. Thriving communities are not an accident. They are built, and they are built together.

Read the report here.