Mobilizing Academic Missions of Universities for Community Wealth Building
Heather Hachigian & Todd Thexton (Royal Roads University)
Introduction
Universities have a critical role to play in bolstering community wealth building (CWB), an approach to economic development that seeks to transform local economies by giving communities direct ownership and control of their wealth-generating assets (CLES 2019). As large, place-based organizations, these anchor institutions can leverage their significant economic assets and academic missions to strengthen their surrounding urban communities (Hodges and Dubb 2012). Although universities often engage their economic levers, such as purchasing power, hiring practices, and real estate development (Taylor, Luter and Miller 2018), they rarely deploy research and teaching as deliberate anchor strategies (Harkay and Hodges 2017). These academic levers play a critical role in economic systems change required by the CWB movement, such as by creating spaces to imagine alternative and better futures and building community capacity (Jeffrey 2024).
When not intentionally mobilized as part of an anchor strategy, the university’s academic mission can also undermine the CWB movement. For instance, universities often perpetuate wealth inequality through GPA-based admissions criteria (Legin 2025), prioritize Western forms of knowledge over community knowledge (Joy and Poonamallee 2013) and incentivize extractive interactions with communities (Tuck 2009). Business schools, in particular, have a significant influence on the development of future economic leaders and on legitimizing economic practices and policies (Starkey and Tempest 2025). Despite recent progress integrating sustainability issues into curricula, and emergence of business programs such as the Next Economy MBA to develop leaders of a more equitable, inclusive and regenerative economy, most business schools continue to attract and socialize students with a competitive, profit-first orientation (Hoffman 2025), thereby graduating leaders who will contribute to reinforcing the same economic system that the CWB movement seeks to transform.
A substantial body of community service-learning and research scholarship shows how universities, through their core academic missions, can better respond to community-determined priorities and address systemic inequalities (Vizenor, Souza and Ertmer 2017; Hall and Tandon 2021; Crossland, Wong and Schnaubelt 2023; Haarman and Green 2023). For instance, business schools can leverage their teaching and research to create more democratic public goods while resisting pressures to prepare students for corporate global markets (Padayachee, Lortan and Maistry 2021). Yet these insights are rarely connected to anchor institution literature (see Hodges 2024 for a review), and business-schools often adopt a market-first approach to service-learning and research that reinforces rather than challenges entrenched power dynamics between communities and universities.
By exploring the intersection of anchor institution literature with community-engaged teaching and research literature, we suggest how universities, and business schools in particular, can leverage their academic mission for economic systems change. We then demonstrate our argument with reference to the Bachelor of Business Administration at Royal Roads University. The program advances transformative pedagogy while engaging with communities in project-based learning opportunities that directly support CWB. Applying an inquiry approach to critically reflect on our professional teaching practice (Ravitch 2014), we explore the opportunities and challenges of leveraging academic resources for CWB, and offer suggestions for future research to realize opportunities for universities, and business schools in particular, to meaningfully design research and teaching with, and not just for, communities.
Anchor Strategies and Community Wealth Building
Policymakers and scholars have long paid attention to the potential of higher education institutions to be a “good neighbor” given their rootedness in place, by leveraging economic assets such as purchasing power and hiring practices, alongside teaching and research to support surrounding communities (Harkavy and Zuckerman 1999). While earlier literature sustained an expansive view of resources that anchor institutions could leverage to support communities, in the early 2000s, business scholars began engaging with a narrower focus on how to leverage the economic assets of universities for economic revitalization (Hodges 2024). This narrower framing continues to influence much of the anchor institution literature (Yamamura and Koth 2023; Hodges 2024). While some studies find positive economic impacts of these anchor strategies (Elenhz 2019), others suggest that long-term impacts are ambiguous (Garton 2023). More critical scholarship suggests anchor strategies that narrowly focus on economic development outcomes perpetuate and reinforce existing inequalities. For instance, scholars find lack of strategic focus, and community engagement and empowerment in economic revitalization efforts, and over-emphasis on university’s priorities, leads to negative impacts on communities, such as gentrification, displacement, and reinforcement of structural inequities (Taylor et al. 2018; Baldwin 2021; Wolf-Powers 2022; Yamamura and Koth 2023).
CWB literature positions anchor institutions as playing a critical role in economic systems change and not just economic revitalization. Recognizing the limits of focusing solely on economic levers, CWB literature calls for greater strategic alignment with academic missions of the universities (Hodges and Dubb 2012; Hartley et al. 2020). Recent anchor institution scholarship is also beginning to pay more attention to both academic and economic levers and their interaction. For instance, Jeffrey (2024) explores opportunities and contradictions associated with leveraging universities’ academic mission and economic resources in an anchor strategy, highlighting the potential for both positive and negative impacts on surrounding urban communities. However, anchor institution scholarship offers limited guidance on how universities, and business schools in particular, can leverage their academic missions to bolster the CWB movement.
Community-Engaged Learning and Research
To address this gap, we draw on community-service learning and place-based community engagement scholarship. Evidence supports learning and teaching models that emphasize active learning over conventional learning methods (Kozanitis and Nenciovici 2023). Recent meta-analyses confirm superior outcomes for community-engaged pedagogy with respect to academic performance, personal growth, and citizenship outcomes for students, but often at the expense of the communities in which they serve (Guanlao et al. 2025). However, community-service learning scholars have paid less attention to understanding the impacts of community service-learning on communities (Vizenor, Souza and Ertmer 2017; Chika-James et al. 2022). In contrast, placed-based community engagement scholars emphasize geographic proximity as vital to forming deep relationships with community partners needed for understanding and shaping these impacts (Yamamura and Koth 2023).
There are also important differences in how service learning and community-engaged pedagogy is conceptualized and practiced across disciplines that shapes how transformative the practice can be for communities. For instance, social and health sciences place emphasis on creating new relationships with communities and paying attention to risks of perpetuating inequalities. For instance, scholars writing in these disciplines offer reflections on strategies to mitigate these risks, such as through co-designing curriculum and engaging in innovative governance arrangements that share power with communities (Haarman and Green 2021; Hall and Tandon 2021; Haarman and Green 2023). In contrast, in business school contexts service-learning often reproduces market-based exchange relationships, exemplified by the tendency to refer to communities as “clients” rather than learning partners, and to conceptualize relationships within academic terms (Vizenor, Souza and Ertmer 2017; Chika-James et al. 2022) rather than as long-term partnerships developed through institutional commitment to a particular place (Yamamura and Koth 2023).
We see opportunities for business schools to learn from service learning and place-based community engagement efforts in these other disciplines. At the same time, business schools face unique cultural and institutional barriers to transforming their academic missions (Snelson-Powell et al. 2016; Hoffman 2025), requiring further context-specific exploration. To explore the question of the contributions business schools can make to bolstering the CWB movement through leveraging their academic missions, we draw on our experiences as scholar-practitioners engaged in a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program at Royal Roads University (RRU). One co-author served as program head and led the program re-design, and the other has facilitated several projects in the program.
BBA in Innovation and Sustainability at RRU
The BBA program serves upper-level undergraduates and has integrated social and environmental sustainability into its core curriculum since its inception in 2012. RRU is a designated Ashoka Changemaker Campus in recognition of its commitment to and excellence in social innovation and changemaking (Ashoka n.d.) and the university emphasizes community service alongside its teaching and research missions (Royal Roads University n.d.). In this context, the BBA program explored its theory of change in 2019 to examine how its learning model contributes to community and social outcomes (Thexton et al. 2019). The process highlighted several opportunities to strengthen the program’s broader impact. For instance, we observed that the program’s impact was largely dependent on distal outcomes, which arise when graduates, having developed pro-social attitudes, values, and behaviors and acquired the knowledge, skills, and abilities to enact them, take up key positions in the business community, apply their learning to those positions, and influence their workplace toward sustainable business practice. These distal outcomes are influenced by many interacting factors beyond the program’s direct control. As such, they are prone to uncertainties that may limit or undermine the program’s social efficacy (Belcher et al. 2018). As a result of this reflective process, the program was re-designed in line with the principles of community-engaged, project-based learning and re-launched in 2020.
The Revised Learning and Teaching Model
The revised BBA program is delivered using a project-based learning model in which projects with community partners provide the context in which students learn the curriculum. A Director of Community Learning Partnerships (CLP) builds and maintains a network of community partners from the business, non-profit, and public sectors, often within close geographic proximity to the university. Community partners seeking support with problems or opportunities are matched with community-engaged learning opportunities. The community partner, CLP Director, and lead faculty co-develop the problem into a project with clearly defined deliverables, requirements, and milestones that both meet the partners’ needs and ensure a meaningful learning experience for students. Community partners then engage with students to explain the problem or opportunity the organization wishes to solve and orient students to the organization and its capacity and constraints. Students are supported by a faculty facilitator who organizes the learning experience and coaches and supports the students as they engage in the project.
The teaching and learning model incorporates “flipped classroom” elements (Bergmann and Sams 2023) where students engage in independent learning outside of class through engaging with curated learning materials. Class time is reserved for engaged activities aimed at applying the learning materials (Gopalan et al. 2022). The flipped content serves two purposes. First, it ensures students have a basic understanding of the concepts and tools used by managers to solve similar problems. As such, it addresses concerns from some critics that minimally-guided project-based learning may result in students feeling lost, frustrated, and confused (Kirschner et al. 2006). Second, it encourages students to incorporate relevant and emerging management theory and procedures into their project solutions, which is the unique contribution that a university can bring to a community-engaged partnership (Vizenor, Souza and Ertmer 2017). For example, if faced with the task of designing a sustainable expansion plan for a business, students may be required to learn modules such as capacity and layout design (from Operations Management), capital planning (from Finance), marketing plans (from Marketing), material and energy flow analysis and life cycle assessment (from Ecology and Management).
BBA Projects and Community Wealth Building
The BBA program demonstrates how universities enacting academic missions through community-engaged, project-based learning can contribute to advancing the CWB movement. Through the program’s focus on local networks and the requirement that all projects be articulated against the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the program directly supports the “pillars” of CWB. For instance, several projects have supported ecological sustainability and the just use of land and property. Projects have included designing and assessing climate adaptation strategies for various levels of government (including for a local urban forest and for the provincial transportation ministry). These projects involve completing comprehensive climate risk assessments, researching strategies to reduce vulnerability or increase resilience, and evaluating both the cost and effectiveness of proposed solutions. In another project, to support the business case for conservation, students used ecosystem services valuation methods to determine the social value of a local municipality’s natural assets. Several projects have used life cycle assessment methods to evaluate the environmental impact of products and services ranging from construction materials to restaurant menus to energy technologies. Projects have also focused on localizing supply chains. In one project, students designed a social benefit strategy by which the University’s own food garden can benefit the local community through free food distribution of surplus yield. In another project, students worked with a local community to help them optimize a portfolio of food security initiatives to maximize impact for a local municipality.
In some cases, projects spanned several CWB pillars. For instance, students collaborated with a local non-profit organization exploring the feasibility of a community-owned entity that would purchase community-significant businesses that were at risk of closure due to a lack of succession pathways for their aging owners. The entity would be financed as a trust that could be financed out of the operating reserves of local non-profits. Once purchased, community businesses could be developed into social enterprises to serve other community needs, such as jobs for under-employed communities. The students’ contribution involved identifying candidate assets for the business trust and optimizing a real asset portfolio for balanced risk and return, defined both in terms of financial viability and community benefit. The project spanned three CWB pillars: inclusive and democratic enterprise; locally rooted finance; and fair work.
In another project, students collaborated with a local marine surveillance technology company and a local Indigenous First Nation to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of a strategy to deploy the technology to reduce the risk of oil spills from derelict vessels that could contaminate the local shoreline and disrupt traditional food gathering and other cultural practices and damage private assets and tourism. The strategy involved installing remote surveillance on derelict vessels that would alert responders to a potential grounding. Members of the Indigenous community would be trained to work as monitors and responders. The students used oil-spill simulation software and ecosystem service valuation processes to estimate the expected avoided losses from oil spills and then compared estimates to the costs of implementing the surveillance and response strategy to justify the strategy. The project contributed to the CWB pillars of inclusive and democratic enterprise (local ownership and control), fair work (creating new employment opportunities for the Indigenous community) and just use of land and property (by conserving natural assets and traditional livelihoods).
In addition to aligning with one or more of the five CWB pillars, projects are also intended to ensure that the community has agency in designing solutions to their own problems. For instance, projects seek to engage multiple and diverse voices in decisions, which aligns with key principles of CWB (The Democracy Collaborative n.d.), democratic accountability and decision-making at a local level. In one project, students worked with the City of Langford to design engagement strategies to increase community involvement by under-represented groups in policymaking and planning and collaborated with a local social enterprise that develops community engagement software to improve financial sustainability while increasing the accessibility of their software for smaller communities. Many of the projects also involve capacity building with local organizations such as supporting local businesses with market-finding, recognizing the role of universities in this regard (Smallbone et al. 2015). This is particularly important given that small, local businesses are more “financially generative for the local economy” (CLES 2020, 8).
Reflections on Teaching Practice
We now turn to offering some reflections on the challenges, tensions, and opportunities in aligning teaching practices with economic systems change required by the CWB movement. Inquiry of our teaching practice is guided by three questions: what are the program’s mechanisms of transformation, how can we measure and manage impacts of the program on diverse stakeholders and, what can be generalized from our experience to more conventional academic institution contexts?
A key mechanism of transformation we identified through our inquiry is the program’s relational approach to engaging with community partners. In the ideal state, community partners would co-design projects and co-teach alongside faculty, bringing their community knowledge and expertise into the classroom, building shared understanding of the problem context with the students and co-designing, implementing, and evaluating actions (Saltmarsh et al. 2009; Haarman and Green 2021). For its part, the university partner would contribute to the community partner’s capacity building and co-development of new knowledge through faculty and student engagement.
In practice, however, this ideal is inconsistently achieved. A significant challenge we have both encountered is the program requirement to deliver a portfolio of projects that meaningfully incorporates the 160 topics represented in its digital learning modules. These modules mirror subjects taught in many upper-division business programs, lending the program academic legitimacy. However, we reflected on how this requirement can unintentionally shape project selection in ways that contradict CWB’s emphasis on democratic engagement and community-owned and controlled economic development. By privileging curricular alignment over community-defined priorities, decision-making power remains with the university, undermining the democratic ideal of community-determined agendas. Externally driven problem-framing also risks producing solutions that partners perceive as misaligned with their realities, limiting both their uptake and the projects’ transformative potential. This is because projects are often approached as technical problems to be “solved” by applying established management procedures. This reflects a model in which specialized expertise is applied to the community rather than developed with it (Saltmarsh et al. 2009), offering limited skill development, organizational strengthening, or resource growth for community partners (Boztepe 2022).
At the same time, this type of democratic engagement with communities requires their extensive involvement, a level of commitment that partners may be reluctant or unable to provide (Boztepe 2022). This is particularly true for smaller community organizations. Capacity challenges can lead programs to prioritize larger partners, raising critical questions around power and representation (Haarman and Green 2021). Reflecting on this risk, we discussed opportunities for engaging with larger community partners, while also bringing other smaller and resource-constrained partners into the project to ensure these voices are included while limiting the demands placed on them. This requires re-conceptualizing projects around a problem requiring multi-stakeholder collaboration rather than a problem facing a single organizational ‘client’, foregrounding the need for collaborative problem-solving across sectors. It also offers the opportunity for diverse partners with different institutional mandates and asymmetrical capacities, resources, and power to deliberate on the common good (Haarman and Green 2021). For instance, one co-author reflected on her experience bringing local government together with local youth-serving nonprofits around the problem of affordability to critically explore challenges of cross-sector collaboration among partners with asymmetrical power dynamics.
We see significant opportunity for more intentionally using project-based learning to convene community partners with asymmetrical power relations in a third-space (the classroom) and inviting partners to engage in critical reflection on their own practices and assumptions with the students and faculty. This arrangement can contribute to giving smaller community partners – who are often closer to the needs and aspirations of the beneficiaries – a meaningful voice in spaces that are not controlled by the dominant partner (e.g., council meetings or community engagement session led and designed by local government or their consultants). Partners can be encouraged to participate in conversations and share critical reflections on their own practice and opportunities to identify possibilities for collective action.
We also reflected on the contribution from faculty that this level of community engagement requires. For instance, since each project is tailored to the specific context of the community partner and requires managing non-student relationships, faculty experience higher workloads teaching in the program with similar compensation structures as a conventional course. An unintended consequence of this model is that the academic mission can undermine economic levers of an anchor institution strategy (e.g., fair labour practices, particularly for contract faculty), with contradictory impacts on the surrounding urban communities (Jeffrey 2024). In our experience, having a senior level staff position dedicated to supporting faculty with community learning partnerships can contribute to buffering contract faculty against these additional workload pressures. For tenured or full-time faculty, additional challenges arise related to recognition for unconventional teaching in promotion and tenure processes (Hoffman 2025).
Measuring and managing program impacts is therefore critical for ensuring downward accountability to a diverse range of stakeholders, including faculty, students, and community learning partners. While, in an internal survey conducted by the BBA program staff, 86% of community partners indicated that the project deliverables will impact future operations of the organization and have increased their capacity to improve social or environmental outcomes, our reflections underscore the limitations of focusing on discrete student deliverables. Such narrow attention to project deliverables risks privileging institutional-driven priorities while overlooking the relational, cultural and political dimensions of our partnership work and the long-term and non-linear nature of the process of transformation (Yamamura and Koth 2023). In doing so, they may reinforce the very asymmetrical power relations we seek to disrupt. Measuring impacts in ways that reflect stakeholder perspectives requires engaging community stakeholders directly in designing measurement processes, ensuring they help define not only what gets measured but also what is recognized as impact (Stroehle et al. 2025). Without such engagement, measurement risks undermining the transformative potential of anchor institution strategies.
As a relatively small and unconventional business school, we have considerable flexibility to experiment with new models for engaging with communities, although, as explained above, within the broader institutional constraints of academic legitimacy (Snelson Powell et al. 2016). While it may not be feasible for larger undergraduate programs to deliver programming in the same format as ours, our reflections offer valuable insights for more explicitly leveraging academic missions of anchor institutions to bolster the CWB movement. Many larger institutions are already deeply engaged in innovative placed-based and community-service learning activities. By more explicitly connecting these activities to an anchor strategy, universities can contribute to building community capacity and agency in local economies. This requires shifting perspectives beyond student deliverables in community-service learning as the main benefit to communities, to explore opportunities for deeper and more meaningful engagement with communities as learning partners. Drawing inspiration from citizen-government relationships (Arnstein 1969), anchor institution literature might similarly explore how to move toward more direct participation of communities in academic decision-making and shared governance. We also see an opportunity for future research to explore how community service learning is shaped by different macro-institutional contexts, such as by drawing on comparative analysis of service learning in Canada and the United States to understand how public policy contexts shape different goals, strategies, challenges and outcomes. While Canadian community service learning has evolved from the US system that predates it, there are important distinctions between them. Community service learning in Canada prioritizes local community concerns, while the US system focuses more on democracy, nationalism, and citizenship (Aujla and Hamm 2018, 20; Smith 2010, 5). As such, the Canadian context may be more conducive to the more place-based forms of community service learning that are conducive to CWB, such as that exemplified by the Royal Roads University BBA program.
Conclusion
As the social contract between universities and society is being re-negotiated against growing societal hostility toward universities, there is significant opportunity for universities and business schools in particular to re-make legitimacy by explicitly connecting their academic missions to CWB. At the same time, it is imperative for the CWB movement to engage more with business schools given the outsized power its graduates and programming have on the economy. Our reflections highlight the importance of intentionally aligning economic levers with academic levers of anchor institution strategies. Through this renewed commitment, universities as anchor institutions in their local urban communities can play a significant role in economic systems change required to meaningfully address the polycrisis.
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Heather Hachigian is an Associate Professor in the School of Business at Royal Roads University. Her research interests focus on alternative forms of ownership, impact investing, and impact measurement and management. Her community-engaged research examines how citizens and community organizations can collectively own, govern, and benefit from wealth-generating assets. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and philanthropic foundations. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment.
Todd Thexton is an assistant professor in the School of Leadership and Management at Royal Roads University. He has led or contributed to the design and development of several applied, community-engaged post-secondary educational programs focused on advancing social impact and supporting community-led change. He teaches in the areas of climate action and sustainable production. Todd holds an MSc in Applied Environmental Economics from the University of London (SOAS/CeDEP) and an MBA from Royal Roads University.