Welcome to Community Wealth Vanguard!

A Message from Bill Shore
 

We are pleased to present you with the first issue of Community Wealth Venture’s newsletter, a publication designed to provide a platform for sharing new ideas, best practices, and leading-edge concepts to advance our collective efforts to create community wealth.

 “The idea you’ve described of nonprofits creating wealth for themselves instead of just redistributing it totally rocks my world” said the first person to stand up after a speech I gave recently to an audience of community activists from across Ohio.  “I hadn’t ever heard or thought of this and it really opens up entirely new possibilities.”

It was a good reminder for me that while many of us have been trying to advance the concepts of community wealth and social enterprise for a number of years now, and may even take the need to do so for granted, to many of our colleagues across the nonprofit sector this is still an entirely new and untried innovation. 

But even those who are not new to the concept will find many new developments in our field that make its ultimate success even more likely than before:

  • Philanthropic institutions ranging from large community foundations to corporate grant makers are betting their own financial resources on community wealth strategies to enable their grantees to diversify revenues and enhance their sustainability.

 

  • Scores of business schools now offer courses in nonprofit enterprise, and increasingly MBAs are graduating eager to play a role in helping to grow nonprofit organizations. 

 

  • Social entrepreneurship has its own support organizations ranging from the national Social Enterprise Alliance to small local and regional consulting organizations. 

 

  • Most encouraging of all is the growing success enjoyed by nonprofits that head down this road, including those with whom we are most familiar, such as the 74 percent of organizations participating in Community Wealth Collaboratives, which have launched business ventures whose total revenues are estimated to be more than $14 million this year.

 

We’ve learned a tremendous amount during the nine years we’ve done this work, including that it is not right for every organization, but it is right for more groups than are doing it now.  This newsletter is designed to share our experience and knowledge on a regular basis and to keep you current on the latest developments in this always dynamic field.  Please take a minute to subscribe to Community Wealth Vanguard.  We welcome your comments and contributions in response.

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» Seeking a Few Great Leaders

» Improving Your Odds

» Social Franchise:  A New Journey for Nonprofits

» TOP TEN: What's in a Brand?

» FIRST PERSON:  Discovering Justice

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