Anchor Institutions

• “Academic Excellence and Civic Engagement: Constructing a Third Space for Higher Education,” by Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of Syracuse University

• “Anchor Institutions: An Interpretive Review Essay,” A publication supported by the Anchor Institutions Task Force, Marga Incorporated, 2013.
  • Anchor Institutions: An Interpretive Review Essay assesses the growing body of research and writing on anchor institutions.  As rooted institutions in their localities, anchor institutions have emerged as important stabilizing forces and change agents.  Increased interest in leveraging anchor institutions to strengthen neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions has spawned a rapidly growing body of literature on the idea, role, and future of anchor institutions. The AITF commissioned a literature review to improve understanding of the state of knowledge in the field.  The authors of the review, Professor Henry Louis Taylor of the University of Buffalo and his colleague Gavin Luter, address a number of themes that have been central to discussions and writings on anchor institutions, including the origin and definition of the concept, as well as the social responsibility of anchors institutions to their surroundings. Close to 250 articles and books on anchor institutions published   during the last two decades are cited in the review.  Anchor Institutions: An Interpretive Review Essay not only presents, discusses, and analyzes important ideas, but it also provides suggestions for future research and writing and challenges the field to increase its understanding and more effectively involve anchor institutions in community development and improvement.

• Anchor Institutions Resources: Campus Community Partnerships for Health

• Anchor Institutions Toolkit: A Guide for Neighborhood Revitalization — Prepared by Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania, March 2008

• Becoming a Steward of Place: Lessons Learned from AASCU Carnegie Community Engagement Applications. Prepared by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2014.
  • Beyond the work of associations and foundations, however, there was extraordinary work underway by scholars in the field. No single group of scholars, perhaps, embodies the work of conceptualization and articulation of the concept of engagement more than the authors of this report. For years, John Saltmarsh, Dwight Giles, KerryAnn O’Meara and Loralee Sandmann, along with their colleagues, have worked to build a more robust concept of community engagement. Indeed, by 2010, John Saltmarsh—as the head of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE)—had agreed to manage the Carnegie Classification on Community Engagement selections process for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The report that they have created, which now serves as a companion to Becoming a Steward of Place: Four Areas of Institutional Focus, adds substantively to our overall work. The report contributes enormous texture and nuance to our understanding of how to go about the work of engaging with our communities. Indeed, the lessons offered in this report were so important that we included them as an appendix in Becoming a Steward of Place, to make certain that we had the widest possible distribution of these ideas and insights.

• Becoming a Steward of Place: Four areas of Institutional Focus. Prepared by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2014.
  • This publication seeks to provide further assistance to institutional leadership to expand and deepen their relations with the local or regional community in these perilous times. Although much has been learned since the original AASCU report on this topic over 10 years ago, external conditions have not become any easier. The 2002 publication, Stepping Forward as Stewards of Place, argued that the regional, comprehensive universities that form the AASCU membership have a unique role and relationship with their community and region. It suggested that AASCU institutions-because of their connections and relationships with their local community and region, the makeup of their student body, and their sense of identity and purpose-have a unique role as “Stewards of Place.”

• Health Institutions as Anchors in Communities: Profiles of Engaged Institutions, by Jen Kauper-Brown and Sarena D. Seifer (2006), Community-Campus Partnerships for Health

• “How to Behave like an Anchor Institution,” A White Paper by ECOs for Cities with Living Cities, June 2010

• “Operationalizing Stewardship” – by Stephen G. Pelletier, in Public Purpose Magazine, American Association of State Colleges and Universities (Winter 2014)

• “The Promise and Prospects of Anchor Institutions: some thoughts on an emerging field,” by Charles Rutheiser, from HUD PD&R Edge (June 22, 2011).

• “The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads,” by Rita Axelroth and Steve Dubb of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, December 2010

• “Stepping Forward as Stewards of Place” – Prepared by the American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU), 2002

• Urban Universities: Anchors Generating Prosperity for America’s Cities – Prepared by the Strengthening Communities Initiative of the Coalition of Urban Serving Institutions, 2010

• Urban Universities As Anchor Institutions: A Report of National Data and Survey Findings – Prepared by the Coalition of Urban Serving Institutions, July 2010

 

*many resources here were previously aggregated by Community-Campus Partnerships for Health or North Carolina Campus Compact