U.S. city’s economic strategy is beginning to take hold here

Few cities have felt social division and economic decline quite as deeply as Cleveland.

So it’s all the more distressing that many of the factors that maimed the once-prosperous city are at play across Ontario — and all of Canada.

Think loss of manufacturing jobs, growing income inequality and austerity budgets.

While anchor strategies have gained traction as a coping mechanism in the U.S., they are still in their infancy north of the border.

Toronto is looking to change that by developing a framework to explore how it might better direct the city’s spending power toward local economic development.

The implications could be significant. The City of Toronto spends an average $1.5 billion annually on procurement, and a forthcoming report by the Mowat Centre and Atkinson Foundation suggests that diverting just two per cent of that to local small businesses could pump $30 million into local communities.

“I think the city sees ourselves as an anchor institution,” says Denise Andrea Campbell, the city’s director of social policy.

Toronto has already started piloting a number of projects to this effect, including one to make contracts more accessible to small, minority-owned vendors.

Separately, anchor-strategy thinking has started to infuse decision-making at institutions such as Ryerson, which recently made it a requirement for companies to source 25 per cent of food locally if they were to win a food management contract at the university.

But Campbell hopes that the city, like Cleveland, can bring together a host of the city’s likeminded organizations in a more co-ordinated anchor mission.

“There is a movement, it’s just in pockets,” she says. “I think part of what we’re trying to do is build some coherence.”

To that end, she has launched a yearlong “Community of Prac- tice” initiative in partnership with the Atkinson Foundation, an undertaking that involves 21 of the city’s largest public employers, including universities, hospitals, transit and housing.

These institutions will meet quarterly to discuss how their spending choices could help the city, and how a broader anchor mission might work.

Ted Howard, who is heavily involved with Cleveland’s anchor strategy as executive director of the Democracy Collaborative, recently visited Toronto to share his experience with policy-makers. Campbell and her colleagues are also hoping to make a trip to the so-called Comeback City this year to learn about the “nuts and bolts” of its success first-hand.

In the meantime, Howard is impressed by the work he’s seen here so far.

“It was very interesting and very promising,” he says. “It could eclipse what’s being done in Cleveland.” Sara Mojtehedzadeh