More than bricks and sticks: Five components of community development corporation capacity

Community development researchers, practitioners, and funders have recently begun to emphasize the need for community development corporations (CDCs) to build capacity. However, the practice of using the term capacity without carefully defining it allows for a wide range of meanings to be assigned t o the term and hinders efforts to study and measure it. Capacity is often d efined narrowly in terms of housing production, oversimplifying a complex c oncept and process. To remedy this shortcoming, we create a framework that views capacity more broadly by dividing it into five components: resource, organizational, prog rammatic, network, and political. We believe that this more concrete way of thinking about capacity will be particularly useful to practitioners, fund ers, and policy makers. We apply our definitions to CDCs, particularly thos e that work with local intermediaries called community development partners hips (CDPs), in order to better understand the role of CDPs in the process of building capacity.