For-profit ventures help nonprofits shore up the funding they need to maintain and expand their programs

By Abny Santicola

Though it wasn’t a fundraising solution immediately, Woods says that in 2008 Good Measure Meals’ net contribution to Open Hand was $430,000.

“No matter what the source of contributions in the nonprofit sector, those contributions don’t appear regularly like sales do. And so we all experience cash flow difficulty. When a grant’s late, for instance, we manage month to month a lot of times,” Woods says. “But having a revenue-generating business like this, it creates a continuous cash flow that doesn’t really exist in our sector. That’s been extremely positive for us.”