May 15, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As more businesses embrace social missions, and more nonprofits learn lessons from the business world, Inc. magazine (May) highlights six ways such enterprises operate.
Among some of the social enterprises featured:
- The group 826 National, a nonprofit founded by the writer Dave Eggers and the former schoolteacher Ninive Calegari, operates free drop-in tutoring and writing centers for kids, with a twist: The centers are housed in small neighborhood storefronts that double as the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, the Museum of Unnatural History, the Boring Store, and other quirky retail shops that supply some of the charity’s revenue.
- The North Lawndale Employment Network, a nonprofit that helps former prisoners find jobs, has a for-profit arm in the form of a company called Sweet Beginnings, which produces honey and honey-based skin-care products. Starting Sweet Beginnings was a way for the charity’s leader, Brenda Palms Barber, to hire and train the former prison inmates, whom most employers were reluctant to hire.
- EcoScraps, a composting business founded by three friends who dropped out of Brigham Young University to start the company, was the result of co-founder Dan Blake’s dismay at the huge amounts of food that restaurants throw out and a desire to do something about it. EcoScraps’ sales are expected to land at least $1.5-million this year. Mr. Blake told Inc. that he and his partners are driven by the idea that “the more money we’re making, the greater an impact we’re making for the environment.”
- SightLife, a charity that provides corneas from organ donors to transplant centers around the world, learned to operate more efficiently in the 1990s. But as a result of improvements, the nonprofit ended up with more donated corneas than it could place at transplant centers. It hired a former Starbucks executive to take charge of a program equipping transplant centers in India, Nepal, and Paraguay.
