How anchor institutions can collaborate locally, leveraging the power of their economic assets to address social and economic disparities and to revitalize their communities.

How investments in the green infrastructure needed for climate resiliency can be leveraged to build community wealth with worker cooperatives and social enterprises.

This report focuses on the role of urban and metropolitan universities as anchor institutions in their community to address long standing inequities.

The Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) and The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) will today announce the launch of a joint research project to explore the role of the NHS within local economies across the UK.

This report offers an in-depth look at how the Toledo, Ohio based health system ProMedica (a member of the Healthcare Anchor Network) aligned its institutional operations and clinical practice to better tackle the social determinants of health, and serves a useful guide for hospitals and health systems embarking on similar shifts.

Based on Ted Howard’s remarks to the recent Alternative Models of Ownership conference, we’ve distilled the eight basic principles behind community wealth building—a transformative approach to local economic development—into this handy one page guide.

Writing for 1812, Sarah Al-Khayyal writes an introductory article on Community Wealth development. In 1812, the article highlights the different strategies proposed by The Democracy Collaborative: “Community wealth building is ‘a systems approach to economic development that creates an inclusive

This report 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.

In this report, Michelle Barth, the Mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff in Jacksonville, Florida, looks at how a municipal government can plan and carry out a successful community wealth building roundtable.

In this Community Wealth Innovators Series whitepaper, Justine Porter maps out how she and her grassroots team pulled together a community wealth building summit in Poughkeepsie, New York — and highlights the lessons learned so that you can benefit from their experience in planning your own community wealth building summit in your community.

The Democracy Collaborative today introduced the second in a toolkit series Hospitals Aligned for Healthy Communities, to help health systems use their hiring, purchasing and investing power to improve the health and well-being of underserved communities and communities of color. Inclusive, Local

This toolkit on local and diverse purchasing showcases examples of how hospitals and health systems are reevaluating their roles as their community’s largest purchasers, understanding that a thriving local economy is fundamental to a healthy community.

Establishing a local and inclusive hiring strategy is an important first step towards rethinking your health system’s role in the community. This toolkit can help you get started.

Our Research Associate Emily Sladek writes on the capacity of local food systems to transform the paradigm of economic inequality, especially for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

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 case study shows how the Greater University Circle Initiative achieved this coordination among three large anchor institutions located in Cleveland’s park-like University Circle area—almost one-square mile of world-class educational, cultural, and health institutions.

NEWS RELEASE: CITY OF ROCHESTER—MAYOR LOVELY WARREN, MAYOR (Wednesday, March 22, 2016) – Mayor Lovely A. Warren announced that the City will move forward with an initiative to bring more jobs to Rochester’s neighborhoods by developing and supporting employee-owned businesses. “As Rochester

The City of Rochester’s Office of Innovation has been coordinating a project to develop worker-owned cooperative businesses as part of a comprehensive wealth building strategy for Rochester, New York. The Democracy Collaborative completed this study in February 2016, which documented the incredible potential for the project, a high degree of community support including local Anchor Institution buy-in, as well as several potential business niches for future worker-owned businesses.

In an era of persistent urban inequality and chronic unemployment disproportionately impacting historically marginalized communities and communities of color, new alternatives to the traditional economic development strategies are clearly needed. This report responds to this challenge by highlighting best practices in inclusive innovation from twenty cities across the country, and offering a unified vision of the underlying new paradigm of community focused economic development.

Low-income communities and communities of color, in challenging structural economic and social inequality, have historically grappled with tensions inherent to development. Who participates in, directs, and ultimately owns the economic-development process? This report draws on case studies of 11 different community economic development initiatives from across the U.S. to highlight a diverse set of powerful answers to this and other critical questions.

A key reason that researchers of 30 of North America’s most innovative community foundations were attracted to the only Canadian community foundation highlighted in their report was its collaborative work. Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF) received a spot in the New Anchor Mission for a New

Originally published in Shareable on December 8, 2014. Ted Howard, Executive Director of The Democracy Collaborative, calls it “the next great advance for American philanthropy”: the embrace, by a small but not insignificant group of community foundations, of an “anchor mission.” An anchor mission

From the Florida Times-Union The crowd at Mayor Alvin Brown’s first Business Builder conference in early 2012 still bore the wounds of the Great Recession, casting a sense of guarded optimism among the budding entrepreneurs who turned out for the event. Brown convened his third annual Business

Our infographic explains how the Cleveland Model functions and how it includes the entire community to keep wealth local.

Indian Country is the site of some exciting new work taking shape in social enterprise and employee ownership. Five Native American projects are being developed as part of an initiative managed by The Democracy Collaborative and funded by the Northwest Area Foundation, known as the Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building.

An interview with the Democracy Collaborative’s David Zuckerman on the Community Wealth Building Roundtable convened by Jacksonville mayor Alvin Brown.

This report, prepared by the Democracy Collaborative and submitted to the City of Jacksonville, Florida, highlights key strategic opportunities to leverage existing assets to build wealth in a neighborhood facing concentrated poverty and disinvestment.

“A group of Jacksonville leaders trekked to snowy Cleveland in February to check out an economic initiative they hope to use as a model for the struggling northwest part of the city. The people behind that Cleveland initiative, a University of Maryland-based nonprofit called The Democracy

Community land trusts are a key strategy for helping low-income communities build assets through home ownership while mitigating the destructive consequences of irrational, speculation-fueled housing markets. Our new infographic highlights the mechanism behind the community land trust.

This report presents research to assist anchor institutions in measuring their community impact.

This report connects struggling communities to local institutional wealth through engaging student activism, profiling 3 administration-led initiatives and 3 student-led initiatives, as well as 5 potential future partnerships.

This report provides an in-depth look at six hospitals in five cities that are rethinking their economic and community engagement strategies.

Co-published by two research centers of the University of California, Berkeley, this paper from the Democracy Collaborative explores the impact of anchor institutions on wealth building and job creation in low-income communities.

Resources do not represent community wealth unless communities own and control them. This handbook looks at various kinds of shared ownership, including cooperatives, employee ownership, community land trusts, municipal ownership, local and tribal ownership, mission-controlled ownership, and

How can universities leverage their resources for community benefit? This report from The Democracy Collaborative outlines a comprehensive strategy to meet that goal.

The first across-the-board survey of innovative, asset-based strategies that are advancing social purposes.