Dear Colleague,

• Our Anchor Dashboard paper continues to encourage conversation about how best to measure the impact of an anchor mission for low-income communities. Tomorrow I will participate as a speaker on the Federal Reserve’s “Redefining Rustbelt: The Role of Anchor Institutions and the Arts” audioconference. Register for this free event. Last month, we had the honor of presenting the Anchor Dashboard findings as part of a national webcast briefing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. I also participated in a panel on “The Role of Large Institutions in City Building” at the Municipal Arts Society Summit for New York City. Our mock University Impact Dashboard infographic provides an example for how universities could incorporate the Dashboard indicators into their ongoing operations.

• Last week, The Democracy Collaborative and Community Catalyst hosted a webinar on the opportunities that the Affordable Care Act's new Community Health Needs Assessment requirements create for hospitals to promote community revitalization. The video recording of the webinar, which included a presentation by Democracy Collaborative Research Associate David Zuckerman, is available on our website in case you missed it.   

• In Seattle, upset voters reacted to the state’s capitulation to Boeing, granting the company $8.7 billion in tax breaks, by electing a city councilmember who ran on a ticket strongly opposed to this “race to the bottom” economic development strategy. In a recent article, Governing magazine's Mark Funkhouser summarizes the key issues behind large corporate subsidies and offers a fundamentally different alternative — a community wealth building model that broadens ownership of capital, anchors jobs locally, and stops the leakage of dollars from communities. We highlight one such innovative wealth building strategy in another new infographic, which explains a new partnership between Mondragón Cooperatives and the United Steelworks Union to develop union co-ops in Cincinnati.