Anchor Institutions

RESEARCH RESOURCES

Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD),
Northwestern University
www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd.html
Established in 1995, the ABCD Institute is built upon three decades of community development research by John Kretzmann and John L. McKnight. The ABCD Institute focuses its efforts in two areas: (1) through extensive and substantial interactions with community builders, and (2) by producing practical resources and tools for community builders to identify, nurture, and mobilize neighborhood assets and anchor institutions.

Center for Quality Growth and Research Development,
Georgia Institute of Technology
www.cqgrd.gatech.edu
CQGRD is an applied research center, studying solutions that communities, particularly in the Southeast United States, can implement in order to foster quality growth and development. The Center aims to bring together governmental, legal, health, engineering, architecture, environmental, policy, planning, and non-profit communities on issues related to community design, the environment, health, land development, and transportation/infrastructure, developing strategies that build on area anchor institutions.

City, Land and the University Program, Lincoln Institute
www.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/clu
The City, Land and The University Program focuses on university real estate development from the perspective of a variety of actors: including the university, the adjacent neighborhood, and the city itself. This site contains a wide variety of resources for educators, economic development practitioners, city administrators, university leaders, real estate developers, and community groups.

Community Arts Network
www.communityarts.net
Since 1999, Community Arts Network has been a portal to the field of community arts, providing links to more than a hundred groups that seek to combine the arts with community development. The Community Arts Network is a program of Art in the Public Interest, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina that was founded in 1995.

Community Foundation Insights
www.cfinsights.org
A division of FSG Social Impact Advisors, CFI aims to serve as a centralized data resource for community foundations. Through its research, CFI seeks to identify best practices in the field and produce reports analyzing trends among groups of community foundations, particularly in issues related to sustainability.

Creative Class
www.creativeclass.org
Based on the work of economic development professor Richard Florida, this website contains case studies and research on the role of creativity—and cultural and educational institutions that anchor creativity—in contemporary American society.

Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC)
www.icic.org
The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) is a national not-for-profit organization founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School professor Michael E. Porter to promote inner-city revitalization. In particular, ICIC promotes research that promotes a combination of public and private investment to rebuild inner city economies. ICIC has conducted a number of studies that stress the central role of anchor institutions in this effort.

Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard University
www.isc.hbs.edu
Based at the Harvard Business School and led by Professor Michael Porter, the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness examines issues related to the connection of business competition with economic development and social issues, examining the roles played business, government, anchor institutions such as universities, economic development organizations, and foundations.

Penn Institute for Urban Research
www.upenn.edu/penniur
The Penn Institute for Urban Research is dedicated to fostering increased understanding of cities. As a campus-wide institute, Penn IUR sponsors a number of initiatives, provides opportunities for collaborative instruction and engages with the world of practitioners and policymakers, and stimulates research on anchor institution-based and other strategies for addressing urban issues.

Roundtable on Religion and Social Policy, Nelson A. Rockefeller
Institute of Government
www.religionandsocialpolicy.org
Founded in 2002, the Roundtable’s events and publications aim to better define and measure the character of faith-based social services; to gauge private and public sector support for their work; and provide new views on their comparative effectiveness. The website also contains a wide range of speech transcripts and interviews of policy makers and leading faith-based service providers.

Sustainable Endowments Institute
www.endowmentinstitute.org
The Sustainable Endowments Institute is a special project fund of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2005, the Institute is engaged in research and education on how higher education institutions can more effectively leverage their endowments by playing a more active role in the governance of the companies in which they invest.