Value Added: The Nonprofit Entrepreneur

Atlas keeps $4,000 of the $26,000 to cover its rent and administrative costs. It gives the rest to the Atlas "fellow," which covers a stipend for housing, food and transportation. Atlas covers health care too (at a student rate of $800).

Chief executive Beale and his company live on the cheap. He has five staffers and sublets a tiny, windowless office space near DuPont Circle in the District. (For its first two years, staffers worked out of their own apartments.) Beale collects a salary in the "low $40s" and his five staffers split $120,000 a year. He travels to New York on $25-each-way buses, entertains over coffee and bagels and uses free space at Synergos, another non-profit (sponsored by a Rockefeller heiress) that works in the developing world.