Several large anchor institutions in Albuquerque, New Mexico have adopted the local procurement practices pioneered in Cleveland, Ohio by The Democracy Collaborative and the Evergreen Cooperatives, helping galvanize the hospitals' resources and purchasing power to redirect wealth and health toward the community:
Buying more local food will probably be a key component of the local Healthy Neighborhoods push, said Democracy Collaborative’s co-founder and president, Ted Howard. But he pointed to other ways big institutions can boost their local economy. In Cleveland, for example, a major hospital was trucking 20 million pounds of laundry each year to a contractor 45 miles a way. It agreed to redirect 3-4 million pounds to a new cooperative laundry created in Cleveland that now employs 50 people, most of whom were previously unemployed and some of whom were returning to the workforce after incarceration... Read full article.