Intro to Entrepreneurship

When it comes to crafting furniture and fine-tuning pianos, students and staff at the North Bennet Street School, a historic trade school in Boston's North End, are experts.

But when it comes to crafting market studies and fine-tuning business plans, the school could use some guidance.

So when North Bennet Street decided to make good on its vision of opening a gallery for students to sell their handmade creations, it turned to a program involving MBA students from area colleges, where nonprofits learn how a little entrepreneurship can ease their dependence on donors or otherwise advance their social agendas.

"Not everybody understands that you can make a profit and do good at the same time," said Jessica Alter, an MBA student at Babson College in Wellesley.

Alter is one of about a dozen students from Babson, Brandeis, Harvard, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who have been paired with nine nonprofits in Boston and Springfield for the 10-month project, organized by a Washington D.C. consulting firm. The organizations receive business guidance from professionals, and the students, anxious to see classroom theory in practice, have been assisting with market research.

Christina Murray, a Babson MBA student, works with Project Place, a Boston-based organization that wants to broaden its job programs for homeless men and women. The organization is looking to have clients work behind pushcarts selling homemade chili in vendor-friendly locations like Boston's City Hall Plaza and Downtown Crossing.Ideally, the venture would bring in enough revenue to offset the costs of the small program, which would further its goals of offering jobs to homeless people, according to executive director Suzanne Kenney.

As philanthropic dollars have become scarce, many say helping nonprofits find ways to make money without neglecting their broader missions could be key to the organizations' survival. Prior to becoming a business student, Amy Fox, who is enrolled at UMass, worked in the nonprofit sector. She believes more organizations should be prepared for an unforeseen drop in donor or government support.

"What if we have a year where we get absolutely no donations?" said Fox, who is working with an organization called Springfield Neighborhood Housing Services, which wants to expand a mortgage program for low-income families.

Some say the entrepreneurial mindset can be a difficult one for mission-driven organizations -- which are not in business to make money -- to embrace.

"There's this fear that we're going to lose sight of the mission," Murray said.

The merger of mission and business, often called social enterprise, can lead to practical hurdles, scholars say. Jane Wei-Skillern, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, said it's a growing phenomenon. But she said that business ventures take time and energy to manage, and noted that even traditional businesses -- run by people with that expertise -- frequently fail.

"Running a commercial venture in and of itself is a full-time job," Wei-Skillern said.

Project Place is familiar with some of those difficulties. The organization already runs two small enterprises -- a neighborhood facilities maintenance program and a vending distribution program -- that provide jobs and money for clients, Kenney said.

The introduction of a business into the nonprofit setting is time-consuming, Kenney said, and the organization has even had to fire some homeless clients who weren't succeeding at their jobs. But at the same time, she noted, Project Place remains mission-driven, and generally has more latitude than a traditional business because it is not solely focused on making money.

Coleen Sullivan Curry, a senior consultant for Community Wealth Ventures, the Washington firm helping the local organizations, said there is a lot of interest among nonprofits in building homegrown sources of revenue. Most of those they're working with already had ideas for business ventures; they just needed guidance on how to implement them.

For years, North Bennet Street School, which offers training in fields such as woodworking, jewelry making, and bookbinding, has been interested in opening a gallery, said executive director Cynthia Stone. In theory, the small enterprise would bring in some money, give graduates a leg up in their careers, and raise the school's public profile.

JFYNetWorks, an organization that promotes job skill training, is looking to expand its distribution of software that prepares students for the statewide MCAS exam, said executive director Gary Kaplan. Whether or not nonprofits are running separate enterprises, he believes they have to pay careful attention to the business aspects of their organization, both because of a decrease in philanthropic funding and because of increased scrutiny of the private sector.

"You have to focus on the business side of your operation no matter what you call yourself," said Kaplan, adding, "the nonprofit environment is now an MBA environment."

But nonprofit organizations should remain mindful of the ways business can affect their missions, said Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School. If students at the North Bennet Street School know their work can be displayed in a store, for example, it could have a subtle effect on the school's programs.

"All of a sudden there's a different criterion for how we choose the projects the students are working on," Leonard said.

The idea of combining business and social mission is not new. The Salvation Army, for example, began operating thrift stores in 1890, and the revenue offsets the costs of substance-abuse programs for adults, said Lt. Col. Timothy Raines, a regional director for the Salvation Army's adult rehabilitation program.

While few are certain that they will continue working in the nonprofit sector once they graduate, the students say the experience has given them a chance to apply what they learn in the classroom.

"They don't just do the theory, there's also the practicality," said Aviva Rothman-Shore, an MBA student at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management who has worked with JFYNetWorks.

That is something the nonprofits, increasingly aware of the practical need to find new revenue streams, have appreciated as well.

"It's what we knew we had to do, but didn't exactly know how to do it," Kaplan said.

Emily Shartin can be reached at eshartin@globe.com.