Dear Colleague,

• We are pleased to announce the release of The Democracy Collaborative’s Anchor Dashboard. This paper, and a companion research report, are based on extensive Democracy Collaborative research (including 75 interviews of anchor institution and community leaders). Our goal is to help institutions reflect and assess broadly the long-term impact of their anchor-mission activities, and particularly the extent to which they may benefit low-income children, families and communities. Highlighted today by The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Anchor Dashboard identifies twelve priority areas and corresponding indicators that anchor institutions can use to assess current local conditions and evaluate institutional progress in aligning their activities with the needs of the community. Read more on this below.     

• Last month, The Democracy Collaborative and the Northwest Area Foundation convened our first gathering of Native American community development leaders in a “Learning/Action Laboratory for Community Wealth Building.” This year-long program was kicked off in a San Francisco Bay Area two-day meeting that included visits with worker cooperative incubator WAGES, social enterprise Solar Richmond (and its newly launched worker coop Pamoja Energy Solutions), and ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) company Recology. Learn about the Learning/Action Lab project and our first meeting at our new program website.  
   
• Gar Alperovitz presented a keynote address at the Annual Conference of the Academy of Management, the nation’s leading professional association of over 17,000 business school professors and scholars, held in Orlando, Florida. A breakthrough among business professionals, the Conference (entitled “Capitalism in Question") focused on fundamental problems facing the economic system, themes that Gar writes about in his recent book What Then Must We Do? and discusses on his current book tour. The conference was profiled in BusinessWeek’s Management Blog. 

• Our friends at the Capital Institute released video highlights from a symposium entitled “Beyond Sustainability: The Road to Regenerative Capitalism” where I had the opportunity to speak about community wealth building and how anchor institution partnerships can promote job creation and build community wealth.