Leveraging unique physical and intellectual assets found at schools, museums, and charities can generate much-needed revenue.
Others in the nonprofit world are discovering the same thing. For-profit side businesses that leverage unique physical and intellectual assets found at schools, museums, and charities are generating much-needed revenue in a time when few nonprofits can thrive on beneficence alone.
One contest in particular bears witness to the trend. For the third year in a row, about 500 nonprofit organizations have submitted for-profit business plans in a competition cosponsored by the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Yale School of Management. This month, the contest announced eight winners who will share $500,000 in prize money. One example: EcoLogic Finance, a microlender in Cambridge, Mass., that over five years has largely weaned itself of its original reliance on grant funds to encourage eco-friendly farming in Latin America. Instead, it borrows its capital at 2 or 3 percent, loans it out to farmers at 9 percent or higher, and secures collateral in the form of signed purchase contracts for organic and otherwise environmentally friendly crops.Read more from this post.
