Innovation & collaboration for collective impact

Boundary-spanning institutional intermediaries, a concept introduced in the Architecture of Inclusion, are entities located at the intersection of multiple, interrelated system and charged with responsibility for advancing a shared mission for a group of actors engaged in a shared set of practices. They address problems or advance goals within identified systems that involve repeat players whose conduct sporadically affects those within the system.  They link issues, strategies, and tools that must be connected to address complex problems while they ordinarily operate independently of the institution’s everyday management or operations.

Boundary spanning institutional intermediaries are pivotally located entities with the capacity to mobilize multilevel sustainable change.  These institutional intermediaries operate across multiple systems, organizations, and fields of knowledge and practice.  They have the potential to serve as the instigators of institutional change, the linkages for cross-institutional learning and collaboration, the leverage to induce institutions to rethink themselves, and the architecture to sustain these networks of learning and accountability.

Examples include: program intermediaries, such as the College Initiative and the Posse Foundation, funding intermediaries, such as public and private foundations, and knowledge intermediaries such as the Center for Institutional and Social Change, which use their research capacity, relationships, and convening power to build the capacity for institutional change.