Interpersonal relationships within communities and between organisations need to be given greater significance to ensure that they are developed and maintained in ways that contribute to overarching outcomes such as collective resilience, social justice, cohesion and sustainability. Networking clearly involves both common courtesy and good communication. It is about maintaining a web of relationships that can support a useful and empowering flow of information and influence. This chapter will examine how community workers facilitate the networking of others, whether colleagues, partners, policy makers or members of the communities they work with. It looks at what community workers actually do to establish and maintain connections that are useful to themselves and others, what aptitudes are required and what strategies are deployed in a networking approach to community development and how these might be improved. There will be particular emphasis on the creation and use of links that span organisational and community boundaries in order to promote partnership working, release social capital and foster community cohesion. The idea of metanetworking is introduced, looking at the role of community workers in devising opportunities for people to meet and work together.

Community development often feels somewhat nebulous, fostering collective capacity and stimulating social action from unpromising beginnings. Good networking practice requires both planning and proficiency; it can fairly be described as work. It supports community organising and sustains mutual cooperation, especially during periods of dispute and demoralisation. Many of the difficulties and frustrations faced by community workers derive from their position on the edges of organisations. They are ‘everywhere and nowhere’: marginalised, misunderstood and yet expected to act as mediators between different agencies or groups. They ‘network the networks’, forming boundaryspanning links across which information and resources flow to where they can best be used. Good community workers act not as gatekeepers but as signposts and springboards, helping people through barriers, mitigating risk and navigating ‘safe’ routes over unfamiliar or difficult terrain. Some of this will require disrupting familiar patterns of relationships or sets of assumptions to prompt fresh links and coordinated assemblages that generate innovative solutions to hitherto intractable problems (Obstfeld, 2017).