One by one
Today I was thinking about nonprofits and business models. I know many out there are struggling with how to put people to work, keep them working, and develop the skills necessary to keep people off the street and out of criminal activities. In areas hard hit by economic downturns its once again rearing its ugly head up again and making it clear this has to be addressed.
So what I’m beginning to see is nonprofits reach beyond just developing skills and placing people in job situations with very little support to actually creating businesses. I’ve seen this in one nonprofit that I work with were we are looking to be an outsourcing department for businesses and was alerted to a group in LA, Homeboy Industries (thanks Becca this is amazing!!!), that has created a portfolio of small businesses. This immediately started got the wheels turning. What if these NPs started open sourcing their business models?
There would need to be rules in place not to impeded on the area of service but think about if there was a wiki to manage these where people could extend the business model and keep providing value added benefit to the model. It would be a living best practices almost.
As the network grew, especially internationally, it would open up new concepts that would allow people to create new wealth economies. There could be value added services provided by micro-loan banks to create the necessary capital to get these off the ground as well as traditional nonprofit venture capital.
Thoughts?
Community, Design, Doing Good, Experience, Future, Ideas, Innovation