Keywords: Anchor, Dashboard, Community, Measurement
A university anchor institution is committed to purposefully utilizing its economic and academic capacities to engage in collective impact approaches focused on improving the well-being of the community in which it is embedded. The Anchor Institution Dashboard, as driven by the Democracy Collaborative, is comprised of five main categories: Anchor mission alignment, Economic development, Community building, Education, and Health, Safety & Environment. As SUNY’s urban-engaged campus, indicators clearly suggest that Buffalo State College is, and has been, an anchor institution for the West Side of Buffalo and for the City of Buffalo more broadly. By tracking indicators of institutional effort and impact, which are shared with a wide variety of stakeholders, there is alignment to a Results-based Accountability (RBA) framework and an inherent momentum to adapt institutional strategy and action work to achieving institutional as well as population-level outcomes. Buffalo State’s involvement in the Anchor Institution Dashboard Learning Cohort over the past two years of data collection and reporting has resulted in critical insights into how to further embed this orientation throughout the policies and practices of the institution.
Well organized and presented data, along with visualizations and encodings, can allow these indicators to be more than just numbers on a page. Currently, the dashboard process implementation at Buffalo State is relatively shallow. There is substantial opportunity to deepen the integration of the dashboard into institutional measurement efforts, including for annual departmental evaluation as well as for promotion and tenure. However, this level of integration necessitates much deeper facilitation and engagement around measurement with individual faculty and staff, departments and other groups of stakeholders as well as supporting data collection systems at the institutional level.