The Places That Hold Us Together: Making the Case for Social Infrastructure
About the session
There is a version of development that looks good on paper and fails in practice.
Services are delivered. Interventions are implemented. Programs are evaluated.
And yet communities remain fragile, young people remain disconnected, and the conditions that produce poverty, violence, and exclusion keep reasserting themselves.
What is missing?
Often, it is the infrastructure between the programs.
Family resource centers. Youth hubs. Community gathering spaces. Mentoring relationships. Trusted adults. Local organizations that know families over years rather than funding cycles. Places where people can ask for help without first fitting themselves into the eligibility criteria of a particular intervention.
This is social infrastructure, and it is not a soft addition to development.
It is part of what makes everything else work.
A young person with somewhere safe to go, meaningful ways to participate in their community, adults who know them, and relationships they can rely on is navigating a very different environment from one without those things. Those relationships can shape whether someone remains connected to education and opportunity, gets support during a crisis, or becomes vulnerable to violence and exploitation.
Family Resource Centers and other community hubs offer another way of thinking about the problem. Rather than organizing support around a single issue, they create accessible, locally rooted places where children and families can build relationships and navigate multiple needs over time.
Yet this kind of infrastructure can be remarkably difficult to fund.
Funders finance services and deliverables. Governments commission programs. Development institutions look for interventions that can be measured, attributed, and replicated.
Spaces, relationships, trust, continuity, and community institutions fit less comfortably into those models.
So we keep funding what happens through communities while underinvesting in what holds communities together.
This session will examine social infrastructure as a development strategy in its own right.
What can community hubs and Family Resource Centers accomplish that targeted services cannot? What do we know about the relationship between social infrastructure, youth engagement, violence prevention, education, child welfare, and resilience? What can locally rooted and Indigenous approaches teach institutions accustomed to designing services from the outside?
And if relationships and community institutions really are part of the infrastructure on which outcomes depend, how should we fund and measure them?
Discussion Group Leaders
Andrew Russo is Co-Founder at International Assn. of Family Support Networks, advancing systems-level collaboration and Family Resource Centers that strengthen children, families, and communities.
Arundhuti Gupta is Founder & CEO at Mentor Together, advancing structured youth mentoring at scale by embedding evidence-based programs within public systems across India.
Tyler Spencer is Director at Spring Impact, helping mission-driven organizations scale effective solutions and expand their social impact.
Meera Venkatesan is Director Program Development at Mentor Together, expanding evidence-based mentoring that strengthens work readiness, gender equity, and career opportunities for underserved young people.
What to expect
A conversation grounded in evidence and practice from family support networks, youth civic platforms, mentoring programs, community hubs, and locally rooted models across different geographies.
Participants will explore both sides of the challenge: the evidence for treating social infrastructure as a development priority and the practical difficulty of financing and measuring work whose value is relational, cumulative, and deeply connected to place.
The conversation will also ask where conventional development approaches may have things backwards: designing increasingly sophisticated interventions while allowing the community infrastructure those interventions depend upon to weaken.
Who this is for
This session is for funders, development practitioners, community organizations, governments, researchers, child and family welfare advocates, youth leaders, and anyone who has watched a well-designed program struggle to produce the outcomes it promised and wondered what was missing around it.
What you will get out of it
A framework for understanding social infrastructure as distinct from service delivery and why that distinction matters
Evidence and experience from Family Resource Centers and community hubs about what place-based, relational infrastructure makes possible
Perspectives on the relationship between social infrastructure, youth connection, community resilience, and prevention of violence and exploitation
Lessons from locally rooted and Indigenous approaches to building community support on their own terms
Practical questions for funders and governments about how to finance, measure, and sustain relationships and community institutions within systems designed around programs