BALTIMORE—After an intense 10-month training and planning process, eight Baltimore nonprofit groups are setting out to prove that their enterprises can be both socially responsible and profitable.
In West Baltimore, Our Money Place is building on its mission of providing basic banking and financial services to low-income area residents. Now, the organization is expanding to provide an array of investment, tax and estate planning services to customers of all incomes.
On the eastside, an upholstery-training program run by the nonprofit Caroline Center has studied its market niche and has developed a business plan to expand its offerings to make them more customer-friendly.
Our Money Place and Caroline Center Upholstery are two of eight Baltimore non-profit enterprises that took part in the Baltimore Community Wealth Collaborative 2004, a 10-month business planning process.
During the training, which began in January, each organization analyzed the market and developed plans for their ventures. The Collaborative also offered focused technical support to help the businesses become financially viable. The goal is to help these ventures generate revenue to support the important programs and services of their non-profit parent organizations.
“Our objective is to help these critical human services organizations in the Baltimore community become more sustainable, so they can weather difficult economic times and expand their services to meet new or growing needs,” said Diana Morris, director of the Open Society Institute-Baltimore (OSI), a partner in the Collaborative.
Other partners are the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), the Goldseker Foundation, the Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation, the Aaron Straus and Lillie Straus Foundation, the Baltimore Community Foundation, the University of Baltimore and Community Wealth Ventures (CWV).
The Washington, D.C.-based CWV provided customized business consulting, technical assistance and support for the ventures, including in-depth monthly seminars with non-profit leaders and experts in social enterprise and business development. Graduate graphic design students and M.B.A. candidates from the University of Baltimore provided research and design assistance to the participating organizations
The Collaborative culminated with the eight organizations presenting an overview of their business plans to a panel of business experts and potential investors from the Baltimore community. The panel included Erik Johnson of the Baltimore Fund, Stanley Tucker of Meridian Management Group, William Freeman, Jr. of The Harbor Bank, Penny Lewandowski of Greater Baltimore Technology Council, and Ira Jackson, formerly with the Arthur Blank Foundation.
"The Casey Foundation is committed to strengthening families and closing the gap between disadvantage and advantage. Families rely on the nonprofit sector as a first line of support in difficult times,” said Donna Stark, director of leadership development at AECF. “And financial sustainability is a crucial issue for nonprofits. This initiative provides the strategies, the tools and the peer networks to respond to the challenges they face.”
Our Money Place Financial Services is operated by Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation; Caroline Center Upholstery, affiliated with the Caroline Center , prepares disadvantaged women for family-sustaining careers. The other participants in the Collaborative were the Hollywood Diner, a famous Baltimore eatery operated by the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development; Goodwill Staffing Services, an agency providing employees to both public and private sector employers and run by Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake; and professional bioscience workshops offered through the BioTechnical Institute of Maryland. Additionally, the Parks & People Foundation, Patterson Park Community Development Corporation and Vehicles for Change plan to launch new businesses in the near future.
The Hollywood Diner, operated by the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, trains at-risk youth for Baltimore ’s growing hospitality industry. Community Wealth Ventures helped the diner create a new business plan that will generate additional revenue to support education, job training and after-school programs for children.
Our Money Place, which began as a credit union and check-cashing facility, expects that offering new fee-based financial services for a broader range of clients will allow the operation to become self-sufficient within three years and eventually to turn a profit.
“The Community Wealth Collaborative really helped us think through the market. Who are our customers? Who are our potential customers?” said Kevin Jordan, associate director for economic and community development. “They forced us to spend a lot of time planning ahead as to how we can expand our market and become self-sufficient as a business.”
The Caroline Center launched an upholstery training program in 2001. Under the guidance of two master upholsterers, the program teaches upholstering skills to unemployed or underemployed women in Baltimore. After taking part in the Collaborative, the Center formalized its management, staffing and operations, and plans on expanding its offerings in 2005 by selling fabric. Profits from the business will support the Center’s overall mission of helping women gain employment skills and become self-sufficient.
The eight nonprofit organizations were awarded commendations from Mayor Martin O’Malley for their “entrepreneurial leadership role in Baltimore’s dynamic nonprofit community and successful completion of the Collaborative.” The mayor commented: “These organizations, through launching business ventures, are seeking new models and a higher standard for nonprofit financial sustainability. They are serving as examples for other nonprofits in Baltimore and in the state of Maryland of how entrepreneurial efforts can provide for the needs of our citizens.”
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The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a private charitable organization dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States. It was established in 1948 by Jim Casey, one of the founders of United Parcel Service, and his siblings, who named the Foundation in honor of their mother. The primary mission of the Foundation is to foster public policies, human-service reforms, and community supports that more effectively meet the needs of today's vulnerable children and families. In pursuit of this goal, the Foundation makes grants that help states, cities, and neighborhoods fashion more innovative, cost-effective responses to these needs. For more information, visit the Foundation's website, http://www.aecf.org.
The Open Society Institute is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that promotes the development of open society around the world. OSI 's U.S. Programs seek to strengthen democracy in the United States by addressing barriers to opportunity and justice, broadening public discussion about such barriers, and assisting marginalized groups to participate equally in civil society and to make their voices heard. U.S. Programs challenge over-reliance on the market by advocating appropriate government responsibility for human needs and promoting public interest and service values in law, medicine, and the media. OSI's U.S. Programs support initiatives in a range of areas, including access to justice for low and moderate income people; independence of the judiciary; ending the death penalty; reducing gun violence and over-reliance on incarceration; drug policy reform; inner-city education and youth programs; fair treatment of immigrants; reproductive health and choice; campaign finance reform; and improved care of the dying. OSI is part of the network of foundations, created and funded by George Soros, active in more than 50 countries around the world.
The Goldseker Foundation was created in 1975 through the generosity and foresight of Morris Goldseker (1898-1973). The Foundation supports nonprofit organizations helping communities and individuals in the Baltimore metropolitan area.
The Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation supports programs that improve the lives of individuals and families by expanding access to education and economic opportunity, promoting self-sufficiency, and supporting local responses to problems in order to strengthen communities and advance interfaith and intergroup understanding. Through its grantmaking programs, the Foundation aims to remove structural and institutional impediments to human development and to have a positive lasting effect on people's lives.
The Aaron & Lillie Straus Foundation ’s mission is two-pronged. The Foundation promotes and sustains a strong Jewish community both locally and worldwide, and secures better futures for vulnerable children by helping to build family and community supports which nurture their educational, social, economic, and physical well-being. In order to meet this mission, the Foundation funds in three specific program areas: Jewish community services; families, children and youth; and capacity building of the non-profit sector. For more information about the Foundation, please visit our website at: http://www.strausfoundation.org.
The Baltimore Community Foundation helps all kinds of people to carry out their individual philanthropic plans, with the common goal of improving the quality of life in the Baltimore region, today and for generations to come. To donors, BCF offers a complete toolkit for charitable giving, expert assistance in learning more about the causes they care about, and the opportunity to join others with similar interests to learn and give together. To the community at large, BCF offers a permanent, growing source of grant monies, as well as a common meeting ground and leadership on important issues in our region.
The University of Baltimore is an upper-division, graduate and professional university. UB—the state’s career-minded university—is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the School of Law, the Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts and the Merrick School of Business.
Community Wealth Ventures, a subsidiary of Share Our Strength, is a consulting firm that works to generate new resources for the social sector using business ventures and corporate partnerships. Community Wealth Ventures provides consulting services for a broad range of clients in the nonprofit, corporate, and foundation communities. Visit http://www.communitywealth.com to read more about the firm and this project.