Anchor Institutions

The Democracy Collaborative is working with the Health Foundation and the Center for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) to research the role that the National Health Service (NHS) may play as an anchor institution in local communities.  

Tacoma is looking to model a community wealth and development program after the greenhouse built in Cleveland through Green City Growers. 

“Plain and simple, it works,” Ted Howard, a Clevelander, told Tacoma’s anchor institution representatives last September. Howard now serves as president and co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative, which provides research, support, and evangelism around this idea of institutions pooling their power for their communities.

As integral parts of the community, health systems are in a powerful position to further social change.

In this article for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's blog, Democracy Collaborative President Ted Howard and Kaiser Permanente Vice President for Total Health Partnerships Tyler Norris discuss the immense potential of hospitals to build wealth in their surrounding communities. In the article, Howard and Norris delve into issues addressed in their co-authored report, Can Hospitals Heal America's Communities?. The Build Health Places Network also featured the article on their blog.

In the wake of the BP oil spill, co-op businesses are on the rise in New Orleans

David Zuckerman, the Democracy Collaborative's Healthcare Engagement Manager, speaks with Catholic Health World about how and why hospitals and health systems are devising anchor institution strategies to strengthen local economies. 

Like a stone thrown into a pond, every purchase creates a ripple. Unintentionally or intentionally, every decision to purchase causes not one, but multiple transactions affecting the community’s capital, whether social, environmental, cultural, structural, human, or economic. 

New book by former University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin examines Penn's community partnership efforts.

This new toolkit from the German Marshall Fund offers policies and practices to empower communities to preserve civic assets such as public parks, libraries, and recreation centers in the face of public and private resource constraints. Based on research conducted in Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Baltimore, the guide offers a range of strategies to raise money, awareness, and community involvement for the preservation of community assets.

Authored by Rita Axelroth Hodges and Steve Dubb as part of Michigan State University Press' series on Transformations in Higher Education, the book features ten in-depth cases and examines how universities, by pursuing an anchor institution mission to improve surrounding communities in cooperation with community partners, can positively impact the welfare of low-income residents.

Leveraging hospital community benefit policy to improve community health

In a policy memo from the Progressive Policy Institute, Ira Harkavy and Rita Axelroth Hodges of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania call on government to increase its support fo partnerships between communities and institutions of higher education. Given the immense resources available to colleges and universities, these anchor institutions have the potential to ground civic partnerships working to revitalize local communities. To do so, they must change their organizational structures and make civic engagement a core principle across all levels of the institution.  The federal government, by targeting existing resources, directing financial incentives and mobilizing the bully pulpit, can help catalyze this shift.

This new report from Race Forward focuses on the need to develop race-explicit strategies to advance equity in the fields of healthcare and information technology. While these sectors are growing quickly, many career pathways remain inaccessible to people of color in low-income communities due to patterns of discrimination and disinvestment. The report provides recommendations for workforce development practitioners to advance racial equity, both at the organizational level and across the field. 

This report published by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), a UK-based think tank focused on progressive economics, discusses the potential to leverage public spending to build community health. The authors detail how local anchor institutions in Manchester and Preston have already re-directed a significant portion of their procurement to local businesses. The report includes recommendations for scaling this approach across the UK, calling for revised legislation that integrates the economic, social, and environmental value of procurement into public purchasing guidelines.

Published by the Anchor Institutions Funders’ Group, part of the Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, this new report assesses how funders are working with anchor institutions to support community health and well-being. The report includes case studies from Albuquerque, NM, Baltimore, MD, Chicago, IL, Denver, CO and the Twin Cities, MN, and details how funders have moved beyond their traditional grant making roles to convene anchor collaboratives.

Our new report, Higher Education's Anchor Mission, examines how an ongoing—and expanding—effort to track the impact of colleges and universities on the financial and social well-being of their surrounding neighborhoods is helping these anchor institutions align their resources to build stronger community partnerships and create more inclusive local economies.

This field guide, produced by The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, connects the dots between the social determinants of health and the framework of strategies that both BALLE and MIT's Presencing Institute have identified as the path forward in building thriving local economies:

Cities are increasingly turning to their “anchor” institutions as drivers of economic development, harnessing the power of these major economic players to benefit the neighborhoods where they are rooted. This is especially true for cities that are struggling with widespread poverty and disinvestment. Urban anchors— typically hospitals and universities—have sometimes isolated themselves from the poor and struggling neighborhoods that surround them. But this is changing. Since the late 1990s, as population, jobs, and investment have migrated outward, these “rooted in place” institutions are becoming a key to the long, hard work of revitalization. In Cleveland, the Greater University Circle Initiative is a unique, multi-stakeholder initiative with a ten-year track record. What is the “secret sauce” that keeps this effort together?

Commissioned by the Baltimore Integration Partnership, a collaboration of anchor institutions, nonprofits, and public organizations focused on inclusion in Baltimore, this report from Karp Resources describes how anchors can create opportunities for local food vendors and strengthen the local economy. To help local vendors gain contracts with anchor institutions, which typically work with large food service providers, the report encourages anchors to create local preference requirements within their requests for proposals (RFPs), to support the certification of local- and minority-owned enterprises, and to institute local food price preferences.

As the community foundation field reaches the century mark and faces growing pressure on its business model, many communities at the same time are struggling with economic distress. To meet these converging challenges, an innovative group of community foundations are beginning to deepen and shift how they work—adopting an anchor mission that seeks to fully deploy all resources to build community wealth. They are calling on all assets at their disposal—financial, human, intellectual, and political—in service of their communities’ economic well-being. Moving into territory relatively uncharted for community foundations, they are taking up impact investing and economic development—some in advanced ways, others with small steps. This report offers an overview of how 30 representative community foundations, large and small, urban and rural, are working toward adopting this new anchor mission.

This new report from the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society identifies opportunities for community wealth building in Richmond, California. The authors claim that with the development of the Berkeley Global Campus, which is poised to become the largest employer in Richmond and the largest public investment in Richmond since World War II, UC Berkeley and the associated Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have a unique opportunity to reduce racial inequality and promote broad prosperity in Richmond. The Haas report provides several recommendations that these anchor institutions can adopt, including the creation of a working group to develop and monitor strategies for community wealth building and the creation of a fund to launch minority-owned businesses.

The third report in a Dēmos research series examining how the federal contracting system has contributed to income inequality illustrates the potential for federal purchasing to instead promote upward mobility. The authors show that by setting higher workforce standards, which require federal contractors to provide living wages, paid sick leave, and the right to collective bargaining, the United States can grow its middle class, increase community wealth, and generate employment. Indeed, the authors estimate that such measures could foster the creation of an additional 260,000 jobs.

The Democracy Collaborative’s latest report, Hospitals Building Healthier Communities, provides an in-depth look at six hospitals in five cities that are rethinking their economic and community engagement strategies. These hospitals have recognized that health is more than just treating the patients that come through their doors and are beginning to adopt an “anchor institution mission” that can help build not only more prosperous, but also healthier communities.

Greening the Bottom Line, a report from the Sustainable Endowments Institute, highlights the role of green revolving funds — an energy-efficient financing mechanism that colleges, universities, and nonprofits have increasingly adopted as a means to fund sustainability initiatives in their buildings and operations. Authors Emily Flynn and Mark Orlowski show that the cost savings of these funds boost the bottom line for institutions while also replenishing the fund for investment in the next round of green retrofits, thus establishing a sustain­able funding cycle.