The go-betweens

Every Thursday Samira has coffee at the community centre. She knows the residents who have lived in the neighbourhood for thirty years, and the new families on the third floor. On Monday she sits at the council, in a meeting about social care. There she speaks another language. All week she translates back and forth.

Samira is made up, but you probably know someone like her. Someone who stands between two worlds and holds them together. In this story we call such people go-betweens.

Much community work happens between worlds that barely understand each other. A council works with a budget, elected members and annual accounts. A community group works with volunteers, stories and a cash box with a little money in it. A funder thinks in four-year programmes; a resident thinks about this week.

Each of those worlds is a web of its own. People know one another, share words and know how things work. But between the webs lies a gap. No shared rules apply there, and a lot falls through the cracks.

Research into go-betweens began in the 1970s. In 1977 Michael Tushman studied how information enters an organisation. It often turned out to pass through a few people. He called them boundary spanners: people who work across boundaries.

In 1998 Etienne Wenger described something similar for groups that learn together. He called them brokers. They belong to more than one group and carry ideas from one to the other. That is why they never fully belong to one side.

Dutch has many names for them: kwartiermaker, verbinder, wijkcoach, grensganger, bruggenbouwer. Roughly: someone who prepares the ground, connects, coaches a neighbourhood, crosses borders or builds bridges. Doortje Kal made the first of those words known in 2001. The work is the same everywhere: making sure two sides understand each other.

In 2002 Paul Williams described what good boundary spanners in the public sector can do. Above all, they are good at relationships. They build trust, can handle clashing interests and see the whole behind the separate projects.

In 2014 Ingmar van Meerkerk and Jurian Edelenbos asked 141 project managers of Dutch urban projects how their partnership was going. Where go-betweens were active, partners trusted each other noticeably more. And with that trust, the partnership worked better.

So go-betweens do not only translate words. They also translate interests, pace and expectations. They tell the council why residents do not turn up. They explain to residents why a grant comes with a report.

Go-betweens pay a price for this. If you belong to two worlds, you fully belong to neither. The council finds them too close to the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood finds them too close to the council. That is hard, and many go-betweens wear out in the end.

Their work is also hard to see. A report lists the number of meetings and the number of residents reached. It does not say that a row was avoided, or that a resident finally rang the right official. What is not in the figures often gets no money either.

And when a go-between leaves, the connections go too. The web on both sides stays. Only the bridge has gone.

You can certainly bring the work of go-betweens into view. You just have to count something other than activities.

• Count connections. Who knew whom at the start, and who knows whom now? A simple network map shows what has grown.
• Collect stories from both sides. Ask residents and officials what has changed in how they work together.
• Record what did not happen. A row that did not get out of hand is a result too.
• Fund the role, not only the project. A go-between needs time, even between projects.

Are you setting up a partnership, with an agreement and a steering group? Then ask: who stands in between here? And who looks after that person?

Perhaps you are a go-between yourself. Then you know how it feels never to belong anywhere completely. Your work is not the most visible. But without you there is no web, only two loose halves.