Overview

Anchor institutions are nonprofit or public place-based entities - such as universities and hospitals - that are rooted in their local community by mission, invested capital, or relationships to customers, employees, residents, and vendors. Anchor institutions have an ability to engage in long term-planning in a manner that aligns their institutional interests with those of their local communities. Thus, they have both ability and motivation to play a key role in improving the long-term well-being of the communities they serve by better aligning their institutional resources - like hiring, purchasing, investment, and volunteer base - with the needs of those communities.
​
An increasing number of anchor institutions have joined together to form anchor collaboratives. Anchor collaboratives can take many forms but generally consist of a network of anchor institutions based in the community that join together to support initiatives that advance equitable and inclusive economic development strategies and provide a platform for managing area-wide anchor collaborative initiatives. Through collaboratives, anchors are able to share best practices, collaborate, and plan interventions that accelerate community growth. ​
​
The challenges our cities face today are daunting. But when a community’s leading anchor institutions commit to working together collaboratively, the solutions we need are in reach. By intentionally aligning their collective resources for stronger and more inclusive  economies and healthier communities, anchor collaboratives have the power to make real change happen locally — if they can work together to effectively set and advance goals.

Core Activities of Network 

The Anchor Collaborative Network convenes place-based collaboratives to share emerging practices for advancing an anchor mission approach within their communities, address common challenges, and co-develop new tools that can enhance work on a local level and also advance the field.

Core activities of the network include: ​

Connecting and aligning through convenings and site visits 
Leaders of anchor collaboratives value having a space to come together to share best practices, coach one another through challenges, and work together to build and share resources. This Network will convene in-person twice each year. One convening will be focused on going deep -- this convening will be attended by 1 - 2 key leaders from each collaborative. With a smaller, focused group, the conversation in these convenings will be tightly focused on building solutions for shared challenges. The second convening of each year will be broader in its scope and open to a cohort from each collaborative in order to create a space for funders, anchor institutions, and other partners to consider the perspective of the collaborative and to learn about the work that others are doing in their communities.
​

Elevating emerging best practices through development of toolkits and case studies.
​While there are many tools and resources that this group is interested in building together, the design team identified case studies on anchor collaboratives as the highest value item that this group could produce. While the content and format of the case studies will be determined by Network members, initial conversations suggest that these case studies will profile different anchor collaboratives, including how the collaborative got started, collaborative structure, how anchor institutions and community participate in the collaborative, and funding structures. TDC will facilitate a process to determine which content is of highest value to the group, while the content will be created by individual collaboratives. 

Building and sharing resources through an information hub. Leaders of anchor collaboratives will accelerate their work by drawing from and adapting existing tools and resources. Sample MOUs, job descriptions, business model information, contact of different collaboratives, and other tools and resources will be shared through the information hub.

Accelerating learning and cross-pollination through webinars.
In order to learn more about the work of other collaboratives, the Network will host regular webinars that highlight a specific approach to this work (ie, a focus on collaboratives that built joint hiring pipeline programs) or that put a spotlight on the work of a particular collaborative. Through webinars and at in-person convenings, Network members will  have the opportunity to unpack and workshop current challenges together.

Working Groups

Strategies to get to Systems Change
​Collaborative anchor work is challenging and time consuming. Collaborative hiring and purchasing initiatives can take years to get off the ground. With that said, many anchor collaboratives initially launch because they wish to make major shifts in their cities - such as dramatically reducing unemployment or poverty rates. While local procurement and hiring initiatives are an important step in creating opportunities within and for communities, many have yet to make a dent in these larger systems. This working group would explore the strategies that anchor collaboratives implement to get to systems change within their cities.
​

Elements for Successful Anchor Collaboratives
At this time, anchor collaboratives do not have a clear way to understand how their work compares to others in the field, or how to measure their own progress over time. As such, it is difficult for leaders of collaboratives to know where they should focus their attention. Our working hypothesis is that this is challenging to do because anchor collaboratives do not advance along a linear development model. This is to say that there is no Stage 1, 2, 3, 4 of collaborative work. Rather, we are finding that there may be dozens of key success factors for place-based collaborative work, and that each collaborative would need to assess its work against each of these success factors. For example, it may be the case that Collaborative A is advanced in relationships to anchor institutions, but has not done any work to engage community. Collaborative B may have a robust set of programs in place, but they may not have strong relationships within anchor institutions. This working group would develop and test a working maturity model.

Emerging Collaboratives Cohort 
This group is comprised of individuals seeking to launch a new anchor collaborative in their community or incorporate anchors into the work of an existing organization. It has committed to a monthly virtual meeting to learn from one another, support one another, share with one another, and hold each other accountable to moving forward the work in their home communities. They request that TDC facilitate these conversations, pull in content experts, and provide coaching and teaching on how to launch place-based collaboratives.


​

Building Place-based Ecosystems for Employee Ownership 
​This emergent working group is built on the recognition that localizing purchasing, hiring, and investment is a step toward a more inclusive and equitable economy, but only a first step. Working toward system change involves deeper work to shift local economic assets to broad-based ownership. Our research at TDC has identified that the model of broad-based ownership most ready for scale is employee ownership. This working group will consist of three to four collaboratives interested in exploring how they can support employee ownership transitions in their community. In the first six months, they will begin by learning the basics of employee ownership, and what other cities are doing to support employee ownership, with presentations from content experts and case studies. Coaching sessions will aid each collaborative in crafting its own intervention. Each participant will then conceptualize, design, and begin to implement an intervention in the second six months of year one. Possible approaches could include helping anchors support a local conversion; doing trainings of advisers through a university small business development center (newly mandated to support EO by the Main Street Employee Ownership Act); holding informational gatherings for local business leaders nearing retirement; initiating conversations around building a funding source for employee ownership conversions in a local CDFI, with a local bank, or through anchor investments; or working with city economic development to sponsor an inventory of local businesses at risk of loss because of owner retirement and company closure.