Case study: Washington DC Community Anchor Partnership

Despite 47% of businesses in the District of Columbia being owned by Black and Minority Ethnic entrepreneurs they only receive 3% of the region’s $205bn spend on goods and services.

The DC Community Anchor Partnership was created by the Coalition for Non-profit Housing and Economic Development (CNHED), which is a Washington DC non-profit. CNHED worked closely with the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

The Partnership comprises:

  • Four anchor members (one university and three hospitals)

  • Three community partners (one municipal department’s technical assistance centre, one community development centre, and one community investment fund)

  • Six founders (one government department,  one non-profit and four businesses).

The partnership has two full-time staff and has three main functions:

  1. Connecting anchor institutions to share best practices

  2. Analysing the procurement needs of each anchor institution

  3. Identifying which goods and services are currently being outsourced to regional or national suppliers could be replaced by local small and diverse businesses.


The partnership’s staff include former corporate procurement officers, who analyse the anchor’s procurement practices, encourage them to change practices, and match them with local small and diverse businesses. Their engagements are focused on the anchors’ senior teams and procurement teams. They create individual action plans, with specific goals and timelines, for each anchor.

The partnership’s staff have also created a database of approximately 5,500 local small and diverse businesses, which they use to identify, screen and match against anchor procurement opportunities. They also connect the small and diverse businesses with technical assistance to get them ready to compete for contracts and successfully deliver them. Where a contract is too large for any one local small and diverse business, the staff work with the anchor to split the bid between two or more providers.

In response to COVID-19, the partnership shared with its anchors a pre-vetted list of goods and services offered by small and diverse businesses, including masks, gowns, gloves, and cleaning and catering services. In 2017, the four anchors procured $5.1 million from local small and diverse businesses with the help of the partnership and that number had grown to $15.3 million in 2019.