A New Anchor Mission for a New Century: Community foundations deploying all resources to build community wealth

You are here

Home » Toolbox
Organization: 
The Democracy Collaborative
Author: 
Marjorie Kelly and Violeta Duncan

As the community foundation field reaches the century mark and faces growing pressure on its business model, many communities at the same time are struggling with economic distress. To meet these converging challenges, an innovative group of community foundations are beginning to deepen and shift how they work—adopting an anchor mission that seeks to fully deploy all resources to build community wealth. They are calling on all assets at their disposal—financial, human, intellectual, and political—in service of their communities’ economic well-being. Moving into territory relatively uncharted for community foundations, they are taking up impact investing and economic development—some in advanced ways, others with small steps. This report offers an overview of how 30 representative community foundations, large and small, urban and rural, are working toward adopting this new anchor mission.

Read more

Download the report

Table of Contents

Part I: The Evolution of a New Anchor Mission
     A historic moment for innovation
     The surge of commercial competition
     “The world has changed and so must we”
     A continuum from basic services to economic development

Part II: The Anchor Mission in Action
     Focus on jobs arises from community demand
     Finding competitive advantage
     “A community foundation can be whatever it wants to be”
     Deploying all resources: Examples of tools in use
     Strategies for economic development
     Strategies for impact investing

Part III: The Thinking Behind These New Approaches
     Benefits and challenges
     Why impact investing?
     Why economic development?
     From ending poverty to creating wealth

Part IV: Moving Ahead
     Five steps to getting started
     Conclusions and recommendations

Part V: An Innovative 30
     Community wealth building activity at 30 community foundations

Appendix
     Interviews Conducted
     Resources
     Notes

Year: 
2014
Format: 
Research report
Categories: 
Conceptual Frameworks & Approaches
Entrepreneurship & Business Development
Finance
Organizational Development
Source: 
Weblink
Org
Theme: 
Research

If a link on this page is broken, please notify us at engagement at ccednet-rcdec.ca