Funding the Spirit of Collaboration

We have another organization in town that is a shelter that does workforce training for men. One of the areas where they do workforce training is in food preparation and food service. They've created a business out of that, whereby they provide food-service operations to other nonprofits. So what they're doing is collaborating with nonprofits who have a need for food service as part of their mission but don't have the facilities or the capacity to do that. And they actually purchase those services 
from this organization that has it as a part of their 
training and part of their mission to bring to the men that come to the shelter.

We also have had two human-services organizations in Boston who were doing very, very similar things — contiguous service territories that decided they could do a much better job if they did a complete merger. And, in fact, they did that and now are working through all the details of how they actually operate on an ongoing basis as merged entities. So that gives you a sense of the range of things that we're talking about. FS