Thinking In Networks
Moving Beyond Individual People and Organizations
I want to take a first run at the question I posed a few weeks ago in Resistance Through Construction:
How do individual nonprofits or churches or community groups integrate community transformation into their normal work so as to actually help build a community aligned with justice?
To begin, we need to know what we mean by a “community aligned with justice.” My working definition draws from Bryan Stevenson’s assertion that “The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.” The implication is that poverty is more than just a lack of funds. It is a denial of a person’s fundamental needs, whether to sustenance or shelter, social connection or opportunities for growth and fulfillment. A community aligned with justice is one that ensures all those needs are met.
That formulation reminds me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, although I prefer something non-hierarchical, which is why I have gravitated to the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). The SDOH groups the vast array of factors influencing human health and well-being into five broad areas: economic stability, education access and quality, health care access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, and social and community context.
Networks of People
SDOH is commonly employed by social service organizations as a framework for addressing individual clients’ needs. Notice, however, that an individual’s experience in most of the SDOH areas is actually partly a function of the community they are part of.
That was a core idea in Marc Dones’ talk at the 2025 National Alliance to End Homelessness conference where he notes that “pathways into homelessness for people of color are often characterized by an absence of economic safety nets in their family and social networks. It’s not that Black communities lack supportive relationships … but rather that the economic capital those ties can generate is stretched thin across many people in need.” In other words, “[a] person experiencing homelessness is a symptom of a broader weakness in the network that surrounds them.”
Homelessness falls under the economic stability category, but a similar pattern holds in the others as well. While education access and quality obviously requires that high-quality educational resources and opportunities be at hand, how much an individual will benefit from them is also affected by their family and community contexts, for example, whether kids are exposed to books and reading from an early age and whether learning is valued by the community. That is central to the theory of change of Read2Succeed, a program here in Asheville that works to address “the race-based opportunity gap through community-powered literacy programming that engages children, families, and community partners.”
The remaining categories are similar. Neighborhood and built environment and social and community context obviously have a lot to do with the community someone is part of. Even health care access and quality is affected not just by the availability of health care resources, but also by community attitudes and culture. Those can play out positively or negatively, as evidenced by the ways that community attitudes toward mental health support or vaccination can influence health outcomes just as much as actual healthcare access.
In sum, the health and well-being of individuals is inextricably entangled in the dynamics and culture of their personal networks. Those, of course, are in turn entangled with the larger system.
Interventions that focus only on the individual ignore that.
Thus, the larger idea in Dones’ talk is that we must go beyond a focus on “the singular needs of the person in front of us” to “renourishing the network, the roots, that person comes from, grows from. Because systems are not actually made of forms and funding streams. They are made of relationships. And if we aren’t tending to those directly, then we’re not actually doing systems work” [italics mine].
That is a partial answer to the question I began with. By building the health of the underlying community network, organizations can both address individual needs more effectively and contribute to systems change by changing the context in which the system has to operate.
That’s not enough by itself, of course, since the system will inevitably push back hard on those efforts. That must be directly confronted as well.
Networks of Organizations
When we start from a particular problem like homelessness, it’s easy to become so focused on directly addressing the needs of those experiencing it that we neglect the larger system dynamics that put them there in the first place.
What actually causes people to become homeless? For the vast majority the reason is simple: they become unable to afford their home.
Where I live in Buncombe County in 2024, 26.7% of residents were housing cost-burdened, paying over 30% of their gross household income on housing and utilities. The burden on renters is even higher: 53% of renters vs 19% of homeowners in Buncombe County according to the NC Housing Coalition. Given that 40% of Americans lack funds to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, large numbers of people are just a crisis away from losing their housing.
No surprise then that we have a problem with homelessness here. But it’s important to go deeper. Why can’t they afford it?
The vast majority of people here work, including those who are experiencing homelessness, yet they are unable to earn enough even from multiple jobs to stably afford a place to live. The scale of the issue makes clear that it’s not a problem of poor individual choices. It’s a failure of the overall economic system to fulfill its basic purpose.
We have had to develop a network of systems to plug the gaps left by that failure. In effect, government programs like SNAP or Medicaid, as well as most of the system of nonprofits and philanthropy, are collectively the duct tape and baling wire that we use to keep the system from breaking down completely.
We’re not used to seeing things in those terms. For one thing, we are not used to thinking in system terms at all. We separate issues into siloes, effectively blinding ourselves to their interconnections. Take housing and healthcare. They may seem unrelated ... until we discover that 19% of U.S. households carry medical debt, with disproportionate burden falling on many of the same people at heightened risk of losing housing.
We are distracted as well by the fact that these same programs serve as political battlegrounds, drawing attention away from more fundamental political battles over the economic system itself and the very reason the programs are needed.
The antidote, and the second part of the answer to my question, is that organizations must find ways to act and think as a system, to create a shared platform for confronting the current system through collaboration, both within and across domains.
I’ll dive into that more in my next article. Spoiler: as with the first part of the answer, what is strategic for transformation will turn out to simultaneously improve the capacity and resilience of the services themselves.
Afterthoughts
We’re entering a new phase of the resistance. I found this article really helpful for staying oriented in the midst of all the chaos of the Trump administration’s assault on U.S. democracy. The author uses an organizing framework to offer a “hot take” on where we are and what we can expect going forward.
The Local Turn. This is a beautiful essay by Jason Ferenczi about place and home, about “how much love and labor it takes to hold a community together, especially in fractured times,” and about seeking to know “what it would mean to be more deeply rooted in the place where I actually wake up every day .. to build relationship, to cultivate meaning, to tend the social soil right where I am.” Together with Jason I am convinced building our own communities is the path to rebuilding our country or the world.
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