Dear Colleague,
 
For more than a decade, The Democracy Collaborative has worked with anchor institutions across the country to leverage their economic power to benefit their surrounding communities. This approach has transformative potential: taken together, just three types of anchors—hospitals, universities, and community foundations—represent around $2 trillion in resources that can advance inclusive, equitable economic development.
 
Today there is a growing movement among anchor institutions to help strengthen their local economics and communities. Last week, the Funders Network released a new report on how funders are helping to catalyze this work, from Albuquerque to Chicago. We are proud to be part of the national ecosystem that is helping to build this movement across America.
 
The Democracy Collaborative works to develop tools, resources, and networks to realize this potential and help these institutions adopt an “anchor mission.” That is: a commitment to intentionally apply an institution’s long-term, place-based assets in partnership with community to mutually benefit the long-term well-being of both. Through strategies such as inclusive, local purchasing and hiring, supporting democratized ownership, and place-based investment, anchors can work with partners to begin to reverse trends of disinvestment in their communities.
 
Currently, we are working with three different peer learning cohorts in order to accelerate the adoption of anchor mission strategies and to foster sector-wide collaboration and innovation:

In addition to these cohorts, we are supporting communities across the country to foster anchor collaboratives, from Rochester, New York, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and most recently in South Florida and Houston, Texas. We are also seeing interest in the anchor mission approach take root outside the United States. In July, I had the opportunity to present about the transformative potential of health systems adopting an anchor mission to the National Health Service leadership in the UK.
 
In 2018 and 2019, one of our key anchor priorities will be to further equip anchor leaders with the tools they need to drive change within their institutions and communities. Earlier this year, we released the Hospitals Aligned for Healthy Communities toolkit series, developed with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which compiles best practices, case studies, templates, and other resources for getting started. We will be developing additional tools for implementation and dissemination networks in order to accelerate and expand the adoption of anchor mission strategies.
 
The anchor mission is just one of many areas where Democracy Collaborative staff and our partners are working to advance equity and inclusion, build wealth, and strengthen democratic life. By helping to build resilient local ecosystems of community wealth building, we strive to create fundamental systemic change across our nation. I invite you to read more about the many arenas where our staff and partners are working in the sections below.
 

Sincerely,

Ted Howard
President & Co-Founder,
The Democracy Collaborative