Serving as the infrastructure team for a place-based initiative requires operating in a uniquely relational role. A leader in this role must continually convene and broker cross-sector relationships between community groups, local government, funders and service organisations, and this requires more than project management. They need to practice deep relational work; creating safe spaces for dialogue, building trust over time, and hearing hard truths. This is not simply transactional convening, it is the weaving together of people with different identities, interests and histories. Without a foundation of authentic relationships, the alignment needed for shared vision building and collective action simply will not happen. The backbone team must be adept facilitators, able to listen, reflect and translate what is being said into meaningful strategy, while simultaneously holding space for conflict, tension and power dynamics.

Empathy is at the heart of this relational practice. Effective infrastructure teams must understand not only the organisational perspectives of their partners, but the lived experience of the individuals within them, and the communities they serve. Emotional intelligence helps them to see the system through many lenses, recognising where pain points are, why certain groups feel excluded, and how past injustices or mistrust shape people’s willingness to engage in the work. This kind of empathetic leadership enables adaptive learning. When things go off-course, an effective backbone can acknowledge the emotional impact, adapt its approach, and re-engage its partners in a way that honours their dignity. Because the work is about systems-change, not just short-term projects, empathy ensures that decisions aren’t just effective but also respectful, inclusive and just.

The team must simultaneously be a neutral entity, servicing all parts of the place in which they function equitably, whilst also being a non-neutral bureaucrat, as it navigates institutional, neighbourhood, funder and sometimes government politics, attempting to shift the system. Being politically astute is non-negotiable. Successful backbone actors must read and respond to shifting power relationships, policy levers and structural constraints. They need to understand how decisions get made in local government, where the levers for change lie, and when to push forward or to pause. All the while, mediating tensions among partners with competing agendas, and making tough calls whilst preserving trust.

Infrastructure leaders juggle many priorities, manage conflict and broker compromise without appearing heavy-handed. Their political competence allows the collective effort to stay grounded in community need whilst pushing for systemic change. The servant leader nature of the role and the complexity of levering change, often against the grain of the status quo requires considerable patience and resilience from the individuals in backbone roles. The expectation to hold uncertainty, navigate conflict and manage competing expectations whilst maintaining calm, trust, optimism, and make tangible progress towards impact, can lead to fatigue, role ambiguity and a sense of being ‘pulled in all directions’. The deep relational nature of the work, and their skillful empathy, means that they can often carry the weight of other people’s hope and frustrations, and because success is collective rather than individual, acknowledgement and affirmation is often scarce. That said, when the work is well-supported, individuals in backbone roles often feel a deep sense of meaning in their work, and see it as a chance to enable change that aligns with their values. But, it is no ordinary job; it requires resilience, reflective practice, and organisational backing to prevent burnout, and to help the people doing this wildly complex role to stay resilient, healthy and effective.

A common criticism of infrastructure work is that it is resource intensive; it requires time, funding, skilled people, and a sustained relational effort that is hard to justify in a system accustomed to short-funding cycles or easily measurable outputs. Yet the evidence from place-based, collective-impact efforts consistently demonstrates that meaningful systems-change does not happen without this co-ordinating, trust building, sense-making function at the centre. Intractable challenges in communities remain stuck for decades precisely because no one is holding the whole, aligning effort or nurturing the relationships needed for shared action. Investing in the backbone is not an optional overhead, it is the enabling infrastructure that makes the transformational change, so many communities urgently need, possible.