On June 11th and 12th, The Anchor Collaborative Convening brought together 135 leaders and champions of anchor collaborations from 35 communities across the US and Canada. The Democracy Collaborative sends a big THANK YOU to The Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Baltimore Integration Partnership, The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Baltimore Branch, The Funders Network for Smart Growth and Liveable Communities, CoCreative Consulting, and to all the attendees who approached this convening with a spirit of openness, creativity, and an eagerness to learn from one another.

What is an Anchor Collaborative?

An anchor collaborative is a network of anchor institutions, funders, and community partners working collaboratively to achieve shared, place-based goals of economic inclusion and equity. Place-based collaboration is impactful because it responds to and builds upon the uniqueness of local needs and local assets. Being able to adapt strategies to what’s working and not working on a local level leads to opportunities for new ways of working on a city’s most intractable challenges. But that adaptability and uniqueness also presents big questions: How do collaboratives know that they are on the right track? What models of success can we point to? What should a collaboration be striving to look like? How can collaboratives balance being adaptive in the short-term with being strategic for the long haul?

At the Democracy Collaborative, we believe that there is no singular path to equitable, inclusive, and participatory economic outcomes. This convening was an opportunity to highlight the uniqueness of many approaches, learn from what’s working and what’s not, and begin to map a way forward together.

What we did together

This was not a conference. We came together to advance our work and unpack the unique and shared challenges that each of us face in building more inclusive, equitable, and participatory economic systems in our cities and regions. Over the course of two days we…

• Visited the sites of some of Baltimore’s local anchor institutions and learned about the work that is happening on the ground. We saw evidence of successes, and heard stories of the journey that it took to get there
• Shared the values that drive our work and connect our anchor collaboratives across the country and across the globe
• Prioritized and workshopped common challenges, articulated new challenges, and worked together to generate plausible solutions
• Engaged with the stories of four anchor leaders in dynamic panel discussion which included champions from Cleveland, OH; Newark, NJ; Rochester, NY; and Tacoma, WA
• Learned about one of the leading anchor-driven community wealth building strategies in the United Kingdom, the Preston Model, from city councillor Matthew Brown
• Shared our own experiences and coached peers toward new ways of understanding and articulating their challenges in advancing local, collaborative anchor strategies
• Worked within our cohorts to identify tangible next steps in pursuit of our communities’ goals
• Elevated the uniqueness of all of our work, celebrated our successes, and shared lessons learned

How we did it

Our intended convening outcomes were to:

Examples of tools and things that our group might make and do together that emerged from the convening include:

• Toolkits & Case Studies
  • Collaborative business model templates
  • Legal & regulatory guidance
  • Roadmaps and planning strategies
  • Tools for meaningfully measuring impact
  • Real world success stories
  • Real world challenges and lessons learned
• An Anchor Collaborative maturity model to understand common success factors and milestones
• Databases & information hubs
  • Directory of anchor collaboratives
    • Who is doing what? And where?
  • 3rd party facilitators for trust building or technical support
• Collaborative “learning and doing” cohorts that provide a platform for ongoing dialogue, coaching, and support.
  • Grouped by stage of evolution
  • Peer learning/ coaching
  • A specific cohort or learning track for new or emerging collaboratives
• Initiative groups, working groups, or convenings tailored to specific roles within anchor collaboration
  • Funders of anchor collaborative work
  • Influencing national suppliers
  • Training resources for procurement and/or hiring staff
• Learning and connecting opportunities
  • Webinars to share best practices and workshop common challenges
  • Learning journeys to visit and learn from the work of peer anchor collaboratives
  • Regular convenings to continue to connect, align, learn, and make resources together

Why we did it

Working collaboratively gives us the opportunity for true multidimensional problem solving. While digging into our common challenges and coaching our peers we identified big questions that are top-of-mind for many anchor collaboratives today including:

• What is the role of local government, communities, foundations?
• How can an anchor collaborative be sustainable economically and as roles and resources change?
• How can we better align a collective mission, vision, and priorities with multiple external partners?
• How can we make out work “bigger” in terms of impact, capacity, and scaling from small wins?
• How can we have structure, but still be flexible to address changing needs?
• How can we collaborate with our competitors in a spirit of trust?
• How can we use our collective creativity to create flexible solutions for all anchors and partners?
• How can we keep community at the center of the work, honor the lived experience of our neighbors, and act from a place of solidarity?

What’s next?

A Design Team comprised of a half a dozen anchor collaborative leaders is actively working to prototype a framework for continued collaboration. We are calling this the Anchor Collaborative Network. Our next step will be to test this concept with the broader anchor collaborative community, and determine priorities for how we might continue our work together. Our goal is to create just enough structure to be supportive of each other without creating new distractions from our unique communities’ needs.

Community champions of anchor collaboratives are leading the way to accelerate inclusive, equitable, place-based, people-focused strategies that respond to local needs and challenges.

The Anchor Collaborative Network builds a shared movement of anchor institution collaborations by building relationships between these champions, elevating the uniqueness of their own approaches, channeling best practices into collective resources, and mapping a way forward together.

Critical Shifts in Leading and Advancing Collaboratives

The Anchor Collaborative Convening was built around Critical Shifts—moving from a challenge as we experience it today toward a future state in which we have overcome that challenge. The shifts emerged from interviews that The Democracy Collaborative staff conducted in the lead up to the event with the leaders and funders of anchor collaboratives.