Meet the menders
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Category A: Connecting and brokering

These disciplines help people navigate life in a place. They work by strengthening relationships: between individual people; between people and institutions or opportunities; and between communities and public services. This supports civic renewal by strengthening the connections through which a community functions.

What distinguishes these disciplines from the mediating disciplines that follow is that connectors and brokers tend to make new links, while mediators tend to repair links that have broken down (e.g. due to a loss of trust).

01 Community and peer connectors · 02 Local area and patch-based coordinators · 03 Civic space-makers and space-holders

  1. Category A, Connecting and brokering
Connecting and brokering

Discipline 1. Community and peer connectors

A woman in her seventies sitting on a kitchen chair with an open notebook, one hand gesturing towards an open door.

Maturity of support

  • 3Codification
  • 3Institutions
  • 3Training
  • 3Communities
  • 3Academia
  • 3.0Overall, mean of the five

The core work of community and peer connectors is seeing the person in front of them, listening to what matters to them, and then brokering useful connections – to another person, a group, an asset, an opportunity, or a formal service. There is a priority on warm relationships, as opposed to cold-referring or ‘discharging’ people. The work is relational and open-ended; community and peer connectors form and foster relationships, rather than case-managing. If needed, they can bring their weight to bear to make sure connections work for people – chasing up emails, arranging meetings. They can also translate between the state and the community, and between different community groups. In these cases, the work is similar to the disciplines of advocacy and empowerment, which we cover below.

Connectors are employed in various parts of the system, and where they sit changes the nature of the work. Some are employed by the state, for example as social prescribing link workers in the NHS. Others are employed by community anchors and the voluntary and community sector; faith sector; or social enterprise sector, where they tend to be accountable to a place or neighbourhood, rather than to a service. The skills involved are much the same in both cases, though the incentives and operating environment differ.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

Connectors and brokers are some of the better-codified disciplines covered in this report, though mainly in an NHS context. NHS England’s investment in social prescribing has produced a workforce development framework, describing standards and continuing development expectations; a national academy, the National Academy for Social Prescribing; and a practitioner membership body, the National Association of Link Workers, working on training and career pathways. Around 3,600 link workers were in post in England in 2023/24, with the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan projecting a need for 9,000 by 2036/37. Nothing comparable exists for the same work outside healthcare, where roles and job descriptions are typically developed locally and there are no shared occupational standards.

Training is thinner than the level of codification suggests. There is no single regulated, nationally recognised qualification for this work. What exists is a patchwork: accredited short courses, some e-learning, the Level 3 Community Health and Wellbeing Worker apprenticeship, and locally designed programmes. Programmes tend to be time-limited. For example, Bolton’s Peer Navigators, one of the more established schemes, is an 18-month, part-time placement with no formalised route into a comparable career.

Peer connectors are a good example of the opportunities and the risks of state involvement. NHS money has done a lot to define and legitimise this discipline, but it has also pulled the discipline’s centre of gravity into clinical settings, and shaped what counts as good practice around what a primary care network needs. The academic literature follows the same contours – a growing evidence base on social prescribing, published mostly in health journals, but little work on the discipline of connecting and brokering in its own right. There is no dedicated journal and outside the NHS there are few communities of practice to join.