Neighborhood Institutions as Resource Brokers: Childcare Centers, Interorganizational Ties, and Resource Access among the Poor

Abstract

Current theories of how individuals in poor neighborhoods access information and resources have focused primarily on social ties, with concepts such as social isolation dominating discussion. But these theories ignore that individuals often access resources through interorganizational ties. The author suggests that an important role of neighborhood institutions such as churches and childcare centers is to serve as resource brokers-organizations that have ties to businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies rich in resources and that provide their patrons with access to these resources. This article presents a set of propositions to understand how and why neighborhood institutions broker resources and applies these propositions to a case study of 16 childcare centers in high poverty neighborhoods in New York City. The author argues that resource brokers may be understood as interorganizationally networked, loosely coupled entities whose actors respond to pressures of multiple origins, including professional norms and state mandates. He shows that, through mechanisms that vary in their formality and staff dependence, childcare centers provide access to a remarkable array of resources from external organizations. Findings suggest that resource access among the poor should be understood as an organizationally embedded process, and that true disadvantage may result not merely from living in poor neighborhoods, but from not participating in well-connected neighborhood institutions. How do residents of poor neighborhoods access valuable resources, such as information about schools? Poverty scholars have demonstrated that one of the most important ways is through their social ties. However, they have largely neglected the significance of organizational ties-the ties of the neighborhood institutions in which the residents participate. Neighborhood institutions, such as churches, recreation centers, and childcare centers, are primarily organizations, and as such, they maintain ties to other organizations through which resources are exchanged. Some of these resources may benefit the patrons of the neighborhood institutions, making the ties useful to the poor or the socially isolated (Wilson 1987, 1996). In this respect, neighborhood institutions may perform the role of resource brokers , organizations possessing ties to businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies rich in resources, which then provide the neighborhood institutions' patrons with access to these resources (Chaskin et al. 2001). Recent scholarship has noted this phenomenon, which is tied to the high, and arguably increasing, collaboration among organizations in the private and public and the for-profit and nonprofit sectors (

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