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

Across the country, community foundations are adopting innovative strategies to catalyze community economic development and drive transformative local investment. This is a new anchor mission, using their placed based resources to build community wealth.

Why are these community foundations moving in this direction? What exactly are they doing? In our new report, Democracy Collaborative Senior Fellow Marjorie Kelly and Community Development Associate Violeta Duncan explore how community foundations are moving beyond simply disbursing grants toward a leadership or catalytic role in economic development, and are moving beyond paper returns in their asset portfolios to locally focused experiments in impact investing.

Through on-the-ground stories, A New Anchor Mission for a New Century examines the motives guiding this work, as well as the benefits, barriers, strategies employed, and steps involved in getting started. We share thoughts from leaders in the field on how this work might best evolve over time, and highlight the trailblazing work of 30 representative community foundations—the “Innovative 30.”

Download and read the report now

And make sure to join Marjorie Kelly and Violeta Duncan on Thursday, December 4th, at 2PM EST, for a national launch webinar exploring the conclusions of the report and highlighting exciting best practices from community foundations across the country.