REDF | Our Publications | New Beginnings

After much research, discussion, and input from stakeholders, we are excited to share with you our plans for the years ahead. Our new strategy combines proven elements of our approach to date with new endeavors that will help us achieve our goal of moving more people out of poverty.

While we will be taking a somewhat new approach — and reaching out to a new group of nonprofit organizations — our core commitments remain the same:

strengthening San Francisco Bay Area nonprofits and social enterprises through the REDF Portfolio to ensure that more individuals can find hope and independence through work; and
sharing what we learn about social enterprise, measurement, organizational effectiveness, and engaged philanthropy with nonprofit practitioners, funders, academics, and entrepreneurs around the globe through the REDF Academy.

REDF Portfolio: Proven model, reaching out to new nonprofits
After more than a decade of experience partnering with nonprofit-run businesses, REDF is uniquely suited to provide guidance and support to nonprofits operating social enterprises, and to help them weave relevant management skills and perspectives into their organizational fabric in a lasting way.

We have been a partner to each of the nonprofits in our portfolio for several years, and they are accomplishing great things — hiring more people with barriers to employment, launching new enterprises, using social outcome data to further refine their work, and finding innovative ways to bring business principles to bear against the social problems they target. They’ve become stronger and more mature over the last decade — in part because of the support, guidance, and other resources REDF has provided during those years. And we believe that they each have a strong foundation in place and are positioned to thrive well into the future.

Given this, we are now launching a search for new organizations to join our portfolio, as our current portfolio groups prepare to become REDF Alumni in 2007. REDF’s greatest expertise lies in partnering with nonprofits near the beginning of the social enterprise learning curve — where most of our current portfolio organizations were when our partnerships began. Our research shows that dozens of nonprofit-run social enterprises in the San Francisco Bay Area are now at this early make-or-break moment, and we believe our highly engaged support can help them succeed. In particular, we seek early-stage San Francisco Bay Area nonprofits that:

Are dedicated to reducing poverty through employment opportunities for those in need
Have an early-stage social enterprise in place
Have an agency-wide annual budget of at least $1 million
Are interested in and have the capacity to be part of a highly-engaged funding partnership with REDF
Would benefit significantly from REDF’s support

Our historic commitment to providing both funding and hands-on business assistance remains central to our model. We will continue to make multi-year investments, built upon annual enterprise goals set jointly by our portfolio members and REDF. Each element of our portfolio approach is designed to help nonprofits strengthen their capacity and integrate useful management principles into their work, so that they can move more people out of poverty.

A few of the organizations in our next portfolio will fit a somewhat different profile, as we experiment with innovative ways to expand our impact — amidst much discussion in the field about “going to scale.” Starting this year, we will experiment with a method for scaling effective ideas through existing nonprofit affiliate networks. In addition to local independent nonprofit organizations, our new portfolio will include a handful of nonprofits that are local chapters of regional or national networks, where the potential exists to collaborate around developing, testing, and ultimately sharing social enterprise ideas that could be appropriate for other affiliates in the network. With this strategy, we believe we have the potential to have national impact without creating a new national infrastructure — either for REDF or for our portfolio groups — all by leveraging the power of good ideas.

If you know of an organization — either locally-based or part of a larger network — that might be a good fit for our portfolio, please contact Joanna Messing, REDF’s Director of Training and Operations, at jmessing@redf.org.

REDF Academy: Sharing lessons in traditional and new ways
Sharing what we learn from our successes — and failures — has always been a priority for REDF. Our strategy includes a renewed commitment to publishing, speaking, tool development, and other field advancement efforts so that we may contribute to the experiences of others beyond our San Francisco Bay Area portfolio. (See below for information about our newest publications.)

Even with REDF’s active history of sharing our lessons, we still receive hundreds of requests from organizations outside our portfolio who want more guidance about social enterprise, measurement, engaged philanthropy, or applying business practices in a nonprofit setting. With our small staff, we simply aren’t able to respond to each inquiry in a thoughtful or thorough way — but this year we will launch a new Training Series designed to help others learn from our experiences in a hands-on group setting. In collaboration with other experts in the field, we will offer both introductory and advanced workshops on topics such as financial planning, measurement, and social enterprise best practices. Stay tuned for further details later this year.