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11 Agrowing number of universities are engaged in anchor institution work, but not all anchor institution strategies seek to meet the same goals. As we noted briefly in the preceding chapter, in our site visits to ten campuses, we found three principal patterns that emerged among the institutions’ policies and practices—that is, three distinct approaches to anchor-based community development. Often “community engagement” is treated as a broad, catchall category that fails to consider important differences that may exist among universities. In our research, we have sought to advance the discussion of university-community partnerships to think more clearly about what it means for a university to pursue an anchor institution mission. We hope the classification schema we offer here of facilitator, leadership, and convener strategies provides a useful step in that direction. Taking the various community engagement practices together, as well as the overall institutional approach toward community development, begins to paint a picture of what one can expect to see at each set of schools. Schools adopting a facilitator model tend to place special emphasis on educational opportunity, including a focus on access, academic engagement, and public education and health partnerships, as well as providing in-kind resources for local capacity building across a broad geographic region. Schools adopting a leadership model also emphasize education and health partnerships, but tend to focus more strongly on pursuing comprehensive community revitalization, using their business practices for community economic development, often with a specific focus on disinvested neighborhoods that are immediately adjacent to the university. Lastly, schools adopting a convener model, like the leadership model, place a heavy emphasis on comprehensive community revitalization, but often place greater emphasis on building local capacity and sharing agenda-setting power with other community stakeholders. It is also not uncommon for a university adopting a convener approach to focus its community development work on a neighborhood that is not adjacent to the campus. C H A P T E R 2 Three Strategies of Anchor-Based Community Development C h a p t e r 2 12 As with any taxonomy, these lines of demarcation with the above breakdown are imprecise. No school perfectly fits in one category. Nonetheless, we believe this taxonomy does provide a useful analytical tool to analyze the anchor institution activity of colleges and universities as institutions and to begin to answer, in a “real world” sense, Barry Checkoway ’s classic question of “university for what?”1 For example, a university adopting a facilitator role is making a choice to operate as a kind of “partnership taker”—that is, it is responsive to community needs, but spreads its resources thinly. This has the substantial political benefit that the university avoids playing favorites and, importantly, maintains a reputation as a fair broker in the community. On the other hand, dispersal of university resources naturally reduces the ability of the university to affect outcomes (whether those outcomes be in the area of community health, public school education, economic development, or some other area of concern) in any particular neighborhood. By contrast, universities adopting a leadership model make a specific choice to be a “partnership maker” and focus time, attention, and resources on specific neighborhoods ; in part because such efforts aim to achieve neighborhood-wide effects in an area that is immediately adjacent to campus, leadership strategies tend to be better financed than facilitator model approaches (i.e., a higher budget and more involvement of the corporate side of the university). Convener strategies fall somewhat between these two modal types—unlike universities operating in a facilitator mode, certain neighborhoods are explicitly favored for the delivery of university academic and corporate resources over others. However, unlike universities operating in a leadership mode, the neighborhoods in question are often not adjacent to campus, making the university less of a “central player” than if the neighborhood was next door. And regardless of whether a neighborhood is adjacent or far away, a convener approach places considerable energy into building a strong coalition that links the university to foundations and outside funders, the business community, and community groups to achieve significant neighborhood improvement. The convener approach thus involves less direct university agenda setting and more give-and-take with community partners than a typical leadership approach. A benefit of a leadership approach may be speed and the ability of the anchor institution to both shape and implement a specific transformative vision. A benefit of a convener approach may be the ability to bring more stakeholders into the vision...

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