Senior Fellow Marjorie Kelly will be speaking at the Greater Worcester Community Foundation presenting: A New Anchor Mission for a New Century, Community foundations deploying all resources to build community wealth as part of the Associated Grant Makers' Community Foundation Roundtable series.
As the community foundation field reaches the century mark and faces growing pressure on its business model, many communities at the same time are struggling with economic distress. To meet these converging challenges, an innovative group of community foundations are beginning to deepen and shift how they work - adopting an anchor mission that seeks to fully deploy all resources to build community wealth. They are calling on all assets at their disposal - financial, human, intellectual, and political - in service of their communities' economic well-being. Moving into territory relatively uncharted for community foundations, they are taking up impact investing and economic development - some in advanced ways, others with small steps. Currently 30 representative community foundations, large and small, urban and rural, are working toward adopting this new anchor mission.