Democracy Collaborative Executive Director Ted Howard was invited to moderate this discussion on the role of anchor insitutions at the Municipal Art Society's annual gathering. Read more about Ted Howard at the 2013 MAS Summit for NYC...
Crossposted from Rooflines: The Shelterforce Blog
America’s colleges and universities are at a crossroads. For all too many students, a college education has become a major economic gamble. Over the past three decades, inflation-adjusted tuition has more than doubled at both public and private universities. Meanwhile, professors are harder to find: tenured and tenure-track professors have gone from roughly 45 percent of all teaching staff to less than a quarter since 1975. In short, students and their parents pay much more for much less faculty time.
Crossposted from Policy Network, and later published on the London School of Economics website, this blog is part of a debate event hosted by Policy Network in London, UK, that was reviewed in OurKingdom by grassroots activist James Doran:
Five years after the financial crisis economic inequality in the United States is spiraling to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. While most Americans are experiencing a recovery-less recovery, the top one per cent of earners last year claimed 19.3 per cent of household income, their largest share since 1928. Moreover, income distribution looks positively egalitarian when compared to wealth ownership.
Green. Local. Not-for-profit. That’s the goal in Boulder, Colorado where grassroots activists and the local nonprofit New Era Colorado Foundation have been campaigning to turn the city’s private power source into a public utility in order to more aggressively pursue renewable energy options and reduce carbon emissions. Read more about Boulder Gains Momentum in Fight for Green Public Utility...
This report, the companion to our The Anchor Dashboard: Aligning Institutional Practice to Meet Low-Income Community Needs, presents the research behind the framework we have designed to assist anchor institutions in measuring their community impact.
In a four-city event on "Community Development in Times of Austerity," hosted by the St. Louis Federal Reserve and broadcast nationally via streaming video, Democracy Collaborative Executive Director Ted Howard presented the community wealth building model as the new paradigm of sustainable economic development.
Can a hospital’s economic development strategy do more to heal a city than its emergency room? This question was at the core of a MIT-University of Maryland (UMCP) case study of University Hospitals’ (UH) Vision 2010 program in Cleveland, Ohio.
Read more about How Nonprofit Institutions Can Improve Local Economies...
Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke addressed the Fed’s Community Affairs Research Conference in Washington, DC, opening his speech by acknowledging that successful strategies to rebuild communities require “multipronged approaches that address housing, education, jobs and quality-of-life issues in a coherent, mutually consistent way.”
Read more about Bernanke Praises Jane Jacobs and Bottom-Up Solutions...
Last week, The Democracy Collaborative's Stephanie Geller had the opportunity to chat with Ellen Macht, President and CEO of the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, about an exciting new project launched by The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta to bring quality jobs, assets, and sustainable economic growth to Atlanta’s most marginalized neighborhoods.
This post originally appeared on the Commons Health Care Network blog.
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, discussions of healthcare policy in national politics and the mainstream media have overwhelmingly focused on the law’s impact on health insurance rather than public health. For example, the 2 percent of the population that will be affected by the individual mandate provision have received an inordinate level of attention. But a separate ACA provision should receive at least as much attention and energy, as it will have a significantly greater impact on the country, and open up new possibilities for how health systems and communities can work together to target pressing economic and health challenges.
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.
UPDATE: The Boston blizzard required rescheduling this event; it's back on for May 8th!
On May 8th, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will host a special event to mark the release of the report The Anchor Mission: Leveraging the Power of Anchor Institutions to Build Community Wealth, featuring a panel of distinguished scholars along with municipal and institutional leaders.
Read more about Leveraging The Power of Anchor Institutions to Build Community Wealth...
Anchor institutions—a term used to describe public and nonprofit hospitals and universities—are today widely recognized for their role in community economic development. But they have the potential to do a lot more.
As Living Cities President Ben Hecht noted in a blog post this past January, “Today, the largest economic force in a huge number of America’s 100 largest cities is a university or hospital.” Yet, Hecht added: “Despite this reality, few, if any, regional economic development strategies are built around these stable and rooted ‘anchor’ institutions.”
Read more about Unlocking Community Development: The Anchor Key...
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.
