“National intermediaries are surfacing to serve rural places
These entities are capable of pooling national philanthropic funding and connecting networks to effectively deploy investments directly into community-driven initiatives.
Intermediaries such as the Trust for Civic Life, Resource Rural, Just Transition Fund, BuildUS and Partners for Rural Transformation bundle resources to strengthen capacity and drive investments. What else do they have in common? The answer is that all these intermediaries are less than 10 years old. There has been a relative explosion of institution-building to address the missing middle dilemma: the neglected space where top-down, national strategies and resource flows intersect with bottom-up, community-driven priorities and capacities.”