ABSTRACT

CDCs wrestle with systemic, structural problems in the economies of cities. Quite clearly, most long-term economic trends are beyond the control of neighborhood groups. This makes their jobs especially daunting. Intermediaries have been created as vehicles to help CDCs deal with this array of problems. Several funders have established community development partnerships (CDPs) and collaboratives-intermediaries that operate at the local level. These CDPs bring together the human and financial resources of community-based organizations, national and local foundations, for-profit corporations, and governments to help rebuild lowincome neighborhoods. In this chapter, we look at the activities CDCs and CDPs undertake to build the capacity of CDCs. We present a framework that operationalizes notions of capacity into five components. We believe that this more concrete way of thinking about capacity will be particularly useful to practitioners, funders, and policy makers.