With generous support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Drexel University has used the past year to reflect on its first eight years of work in pursuing an engaged-anchor mission around institutional hiring, procurement, and construction. We are sharing some of our insights, advice, and recommendations here, along with a set of practical toolkits that we think can be helpful to our colleagues and to leadership in other institutions of higher education who are beginning to shape and implement strategies in support of their own similar missions.

In this set of pages you will read about the context of our work: what it means inside the institution, why it matters to Philadelphia, and where it is situated nationally.

You can read profiles of implementers inside Drexel and of some of our key partners. All of these people have had important roles crafting the different parts of Drexel's Buy Local, Hire Local, and Build Local strategies, and they offer their own perspectives on the work: their experience, what motivates them, what skills they bring to the table, and their advice to counterparts in another university where this work is beginning to take shape. This is not a story that has an ending, and as such we will continue to add to our implementer profiles as new contributors to the mission join us in the work.

We also offer a set of reflections that we think highlight important themes that show up as common threads through the disparate pieces of this work.

Finally and most importantly, we invite you to browse through our three toolkits that are our best "how-to" distillation of several years' worth of trying, experimenting, getting things wrong, getting things right, and making substantial progress towards baking the values of anchor engagement into our routine business operations. These toolkits are also available as PDF downloads inside these pages, and Drexel personnel will be carrying hard copies to annual meetings held by CUPA-HR and CUMU, where we will offer a set of supporting workshops.

Thank you for visiting these pages.