Nonprofits have disrupted many social structures of oppression. They've led us to a more equitable world, but there is more work to do. Nonprofits, unless they are large with endless donations, remain stuck in the “scaling to do more good” game.
Traditional business fail to address social needs in a meaningful way, as the mission is not at the center of their model. We must disrupt the binary models of nonprofits and businesses and move forward to a hybrid that addresses both shortcomings.
Business does a great job of making money, but during a crisis, nonprofits are instrumental to gathering money quickly and distributing it to the people on the ground who know where the greatest needs exist. After a crisis like COVID-19, how we build back matters, and the answer to this is hybrid model companies and collaboration.
Shannon Keith, the BIPOC founder and CEO of Sudara, Inc., a social enterprise/B Corp, and its nonprofit side, Sudara Freedom Fund, is a hybrid model that Shannon has built as a proven model for scaling “more good” in the world.
The for-profit, Sudara, Inc., creates products to provide job opportunities to the women we serve and reinvests profits into training and education programs to help more women out of poverty and slavery, and into lives of freedom.
Sudara Freedom Fund, our nonprofit arm, comes in with wrap-around services to support the successful transition for the women we serve. This includes services such as counseling, medical care, safe housing, meals, and childcare and education - services needed to help women get back on their feet.
Post-pandemic, the new economy must include social enterprise to fill the gap between what nonprofit and traditional corporations can address.
Shannon forged a path in the social enterprise space before the concept became mainstream. After 15 years, Shannon has learned the limits of charity. She will share how separating the for-profit side of the mission from the nonprofit services scale businesses for impact. The second half of a successful equation is embracing collaboration with industry leaders who want to disrupt the channel and partner for deeper impact and lasting change:
1. Hybrid model is the future; it isn't either/or; it's both!
-Time for a reckoning; the modern charity model is hard to scale.
-For-Profit revenue is needed to tackle social inequalities.
-Nonprofits can do what they do best through on-the-ground work, close to the community's pulse.
2. Collaborations multiply our ability to do more good in the world.
-B Corps and other impact brands which work for gender, social, economic, or environmental equity need to work together to sell products through a circular support system and scale their impact.
-Collaboration is key. As our lovely partner, Sofiya Deva, from This Same Sky so eloquently stated, "If we want to see the big changes in the industries, a less exploitative, wasteful industry overall, then it's not going to be any one of us that makes that happen, it's really going to require cooperation as primary and competition as secondary." Other brands are allies in creating the change we want to see, and together we can go so much farther.
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