PHOENIX (STN) – When Helpings Café & Catering opened in 2014, the UMOM leadership team that launched it as a social enterprise grappled with the same questions all nonprofits must answer, both then and now: How much money is coming in? And when will it arrive?
“Social enterprise is, basically, a business that does good,” said UMOM CEO Jackson Fonder during a ‘Leading in the Moment’ panel discussion on the December 2024 episode of ‘It Happens at STN.’ “Here is an opportunity to live your mission and exemplify the people that you serve. But you’re trying to make a profit.”
The idea behind Helpings Café & Catering and other social enterprise ventures at UMOM may seem self-explanatory: build a business within a nonprofit whose revenue funds the organization’s mission. And if you can train people to reenter the workforce, as UMOM does, it’s even better.
“The idea that a company can do well financially while also providing a benefit to the community is powerful,” said UMOM COO Monique Lopez. “We’re focusing on job training, job opportunities, and serving our families and single women experiencing homelessness with the end goal of securing employment for our participants.”
Listen to the panel discussion on finding social enterprise opportunities:
According to Fonder, the key to building a successful social enterprise is understanding that it must be operated as a business—something that can be unfamiliar and difficult for nonprofit leaders.
“The idea better be able to sell,” he said. “This is not a program, this is a business.”
Lopez expanded on some lessons Helpings Café & Catering and UMOM learned over the years.
“It’s a business at the end of the day, so you have to treat it like one,” she said. “You want it to cash flow, so you need to focus on things like personnel cost and cost of goods and a solid business model.”
From modest beginnings 10 years ago as a small coffee shop, Lopez explained that Helpings Café & Catering is on track to surpass $500,000 in revenue this year—funding that UMOM might not have otherwise secured.
While that level of funding would benefit any nonprofit, both Lopez and Fonder emphasized that making a social enterprise successful requires visionary leadership.
“It is a calculated risk, and you just have to have the right mindset and give the social enterprise an opportunity to morph into something [and] evolve,” Fonder said. “It’s still running a business and it’s got to stand on its own and it takes a special leader at the top to treat it as such.”
