Governor Moore Announces Expanded Maryland Community Compass Platform to Help Community Developers Revitalize their Neighborhoods
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ANNAPOLIS, MD – Governor Moore today announced an expansion of the Maryland Community Business Compass, the state’s free data platform designed to help entrepreneurs start and grow essential-service businesses, to now serve the broader community development ecosystem. Built by the Maryland State Innovation Team in partnership with Anthropic and relaunched as the Maryland Community Compass, the upgraded digital platform empowers local builders and community leaders with expanded data insights, new site-specific guidance, and richer information on capital required to revitalize neighborhoods with affordable housing, retail, and community spaces.
"Maryland's community developers have their finger on the pulse — they know the strengths of their neighbors and the potential of their neighborhoods better than anyone,” said Gov. Moore. “We're continuing to put real tools and capital directly into their hands — because building thriving neighborhoods opens pathways to work, wages, and wealth in every zip code. This platform is about continuing to make government more efficient for Marylanders, helping to create neighborhoods where parents can find sustaining jobs, children can have spaces to learn, and families can plant deep roots."
Previously, evaluating a project’s feasibility meant paying costly consultants or manually hunting through scattered zoning, environmental, and funding databases, delaying vital community projects. The Maryland Community Compass centralizes this data, allowing local developers and community-based organizations to enter an address and immediately see economic trends, development activity, permitted uses, environmental flags, relevant funding opportunities, and more in one click, across every neighborhood and address statewide.
Launched in December 2025 by the Maryland State Innovation Team, the Maryland Community Business Compass provided new access to market data, state and local funding opportunities, and expert support for essential service businesses, starting with child care and fresh food. Since launch, the platform has served over 15,000 active users and helped guide nearly $14 million in state funding to high-need areas across the state.
"Working with small business owners, we saw an opportunity to widen our platform to support the developers and organizations building alongside them. Our conversations revealed that capacity and funding — not project merit — can limit what's built in a neighborhood," said Maryland’s Chief Innovation Officer Francesca Ioffreda. "We designed the Maryland Community Compass with community development practitioners to close that gap, using data and technology to save developers time and money so they can spend more energy building thriving communities."
The expanded Compass will help to level the playing field for Maryland’s community developers through several transformational features:
- Neighborhood Insights: An interactive mapping tool that helps developers, investors, and community leaders uncover high-value opportunities. Powered by approximately 60 unique metrics, it makes it easy to assess economic growth, understand community needs, and target investments effectively.
- Site Insights: A parcel-evaluation tool that helps builders and organizations know exactly what is buildable before spending money. By synthesizing hundreds of public datasets across federal, state, and local sources — including zoning codes across all 23 counties and 96 municipalities — it delivers clarity on permitted uses, environmental constraints, and site viability for 2.4 million properties across Maryland.
- Find Funding: An AI-powered funding directory that supports teams in assembling their capital stack. Aggregating over 2,600 programs from 100+ sources, it’s one of the most comprehensive databases of public and private funding in Maryland. The data is also used by Site Insights and Neighborhood Insights to surface relevant grants and funding for specific projects based on their location.
- Maryland Data Connector: With the Compass Model Context Protocol (MCP), users using AI assistants like Claude or ChatGPT can connect directly to Maryland's official program data, grounding the AI's answers in real state records instead of guesses.
The Governor’s announcement came during a convening of community developers, state and local leaders, philanthropic partners, and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) at the Justice Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center in the center of Baltimore’s Upton community. The event, hosted by the Maryland State Innovation Team, highlighted the extensive co-design process that shaped the expansion of the Compass platform.
The Compass is powered by Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, which was used to build the platform's funding database from thousands of scattered program documents and now serves as an in-platform guide that helps users navigate the data and find resources relevant to their projects. Anthropic served as a strategic and technical advisor throughout the project, shaping the AI use cases, implementing safety guardrails, and developing evaluations to measure the system's performance and accuracy.
“We’re so excited about the power of AI to help people strengthen communities and build new tools that help people prosper," said Daniela Amodei, President and Co-founder of Anthropic. “The Maryland Community Compass is widening access to information, connecting real people today who are making an impact in their community, and giving them the resources they need to do their best work. We’re proud to partner with Governor Moore and the Maryland State Innovation Team to bring their incredible ideas to life.”
“Entrepreneurs across Maryland have great ideas for how to make their communities stronger, but too often they don’t know where to start or how to find the resources to make those ideas a reality,” said Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development Secretary Jake Day. “The Maryland Community Compass seeks to change that by bringing together the financing, technical assistance and community development tools that small businesses, community developers and local partners need to confidently invest in great places.”
Maryland small businesses, community development organizations, and developers are encouraged to learn more at compass.maryland.gov.
For more information, contact [email protected].
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