LeftoverPi

For example, suppose that someone was concerned about lack of access to recycling in rural communities. Instead of forming a nonprofit to raise awareness and push for legislation or whatever, how about getting a truck and doing something about it directly? People in rural communities often have to pay by the pound to have their trash taken away, so you might be able to charge a small fee to take the recyclables. Similarly, the recyclable material has value to the companies that do the recycling, so you might be able to get them to pay you for the material. Once you have purchased the truck and taken the time to get a route and customers established, it's possible that it could be kept running on a for-profit basis.

Now, the company's goal is not to compete with the massive waste management industries--the goal is to boost recycling in rural communities, and to do it at a profit. And the idea of the tongue-in-cheek "TM" that I put in the title of this post is that you would have a company whose sole mission would be to connect people seeking funding for such startups to "Nurture Capitalists". A "Nurture Capitalist" is a person who believes in the cause of the given company, is willing to risk money to let it get started, but wants the company to be able to eventually run on its own.

The entity that connects the companies with the capitalists would itself be a Nurture Capital-compliant company. It would provide the following services:

• Certification--Identifying companies that fit the Nurture Capital Criteria. Something along the lines of "they have identified a real need and sources of revenue that could come from filling that need, they understand the terms under which the money is being invested, they have a believable plan for coming into profitability in a given time frame".
• Consulting--for startups that haven't quite figured out any of the above, the company would help them figure out ways to make their good works pay for themselves
• Introductions--connecting the people with the money to the people with the ideas, making sure that both sides understand the risks and obligations, matching up interests, etc.

For this, the company would take some small, perhaps percentage-based fee from the funding, and it would live off of those fees.

Would it work? Well, I know that it is a problem for people with money who would like to give something back to find reliable entities through which to do that. Many nonprofits are unfortunately little more than a place to work for the principals, with huge overhead ratios and much of the money going (ironically) into fundraising. The requirement of profit is in some sense a harsh one--it forces the company to face reality as it exists today and make all the hard choices that go along with it.

Furthermore, it would probably not work for every nonprofit-type venture, and it may only be viable for a small fraction. But for those few it could be a great way to match up givers with people who want to work to make a difference in the world. I think it's worth a try--and that's essentially what the whole concept of Nurture Capital is about. High risk, sure, but a reasonable possibility of becoming independent through profitability and all the while working to promote a good cause.