​​Mobilizing Academic Missions of Universities for Community Wealth Building​

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). ​