Individuals and families across the US face significant barriers to economic mobility.

In 2023, 30 percent of the US population was considered low-income and 38 million people were living below the poverty line, according to the 2022 US Census. This sobering fact, often a result of historic and current racial inequities, is driving social entrepreneurs to start new nonprofits with seemingly novel, innovative approaches. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), more than 1.8 million nonprofit organizations are registered in the United States and, according to the IRS, the number of nonprofits has been growing five percent annually from 2017-2022. This equates to nearly 100,000 new nonprofits each year.

Starting a new nonprofit requires significant time and investment and comes with challenges and risks. Even if securing funding and staff is possible, the time to reach the sought after results will likely be long.

Consider a different approach: when an unmet need is uncovered in a community, it is likely that somewhere else in the country, an existing nonprofit is effectively addressing that challenge. Rather than starting a new nonprofit, consider funding and supporting an established organisation to scale to your community, a significant head start with much less risk that reaches impact faster.

Ensuring replication works

Replicating an existing nonprofit into a new community comes with a unique set of challenges and risks. Unlike a for-profit company, in my experience, nonprofits without the local relationships and connections specific to that community can have a difficult time getting started and staying viable.Prior to founding GreenLight Fund with Margaret Hall, I co-founded The Steppingstone Foundation which supports students from marginalised communities to access, navigate, and graduate from college. After seeing success in Boston, we scaled the nonprofit to two additional cities, Philadelphia and Hartford. Throughout this growth, we encountered setbacks that included the ability to build strong relationships, recruit and maintain talented local staff, local fundraising, and more.

Part of the impetus for starting GreenLight was to overcome these scaling challenges. Our model has found that having a local, on-the-ground funding partner committed to the nonprofit’s success and providing strategic support can drastically reduce the risk and increase impact. Examples of ongoing support include connections to other funders, helping to hire a strong leader with local roots, laying the groundwork for local implementation and referral partners, and staying involved to ensure sustainability.

Alternatively, starting a new nonprofit or a new programme within an existing organisation requires funding, staff, time and resources to pilot the concept, then inevitably adjusting and readjusting the approach and trying again. This takes time and significant resources and requires balancing proof of concept with raising the funding needed and ultimately building enough experience to show impact.

Before moving in that direction, identifying if an existing proven program outside of your community can meet the need with measurable results is a good first step. Replicating that model can save a lot of time and energy, often reach impact faster and reduce the potential for getting spread too thin and not delivering needed services in a timely way.

Adapting programmes to local nuances

It’s important to ensure the nonprofit replicated in the new community complements the local ecosystem and fits with its culture and nuances. While evaluating potential solutions to come to a community, assess what adjustments may be needed so it effectively works locally. Maintaining fidelity to the program model is critical to preserve what makes it successful and impactful. However, there may be adjustments to align better with the target community.

Mid-pandemic, San Francisco Bay Area community residents shared that accessible, reliable and nutritional food assistance had become an urgent priority. With that feedback, GreenLight brought Food Connect, based in Philadelphia, to the Bay to partner with existing supplemental food programs that were struggling to get food to those who needed it. Food Connect complements the existing food security ecosystem by bridging the gap between food scarcity and abundance with logistics technologies and food-matching software, executing meal delivery to get food to families in need of dependable and nutritious meals. One partner, the San Francisco Unified School District, credits Food Connect with enabling them to get food to thousands of families when children were unable to be in school. This was a unique challenge during a unique time, and though Food Connect had not partnered in this way with a school district in the past, it was a perfect fit for their model in San Francisco. The pandemic shed light on the significant food insecurity challenges in the Bay Area. Since then, Food Connect’s impact has grown rapidly as they continue to partner where they’re needed; with school systems, other nonprofits in the food ecosystem, health care organisations and more, reaching 250,779 families with 438,515 meals this past year alone.

Leveraging experience

Another advantage of replicating success and impact, rather than creating something untested and new, is to leverage ways effective models have evolved to strengthen their impact. Nonprofits that have scaled to multiple cities have learned from missteps and can work out any issues before replicating to other communities. They can also pilot innovations in one site with minimal risk and investment.

GreenLight helped College Advising Corps scale to Boston, a nonprofit focused on educational equity that places recent college graduates as full time college advisers in public high schools. To keep families informed and engaged throughout the college application process, they piloted a text message add-on to share timely resources, reminders, and support to make the process more navigable for working parents, low-income families, and non-native English speakers. Once proven, they were able to implement the enhancement across their locations. This provided thousands of Boston families with college-going students, often first-generation, the resources they needed to set the students up for success, and many thousands more in their other locations.

Choosing to scale existing nonprofits

Not invented here syndrome (NIH), originally an engineering concept that underestimates ideas, resources and good work from external entities, can also apply to nonprofits. Communities and organisations may dismiss the expertise and relevance of outside programs and solutions. This can result in missed opportunities and delays in implementing the very solutions needed. In fact, the Journal of Organizational Behavior argues, ‘the not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome has been called one of the largest obstacles in innovation management.’

Ultimately, when an unmet need is identified in the community, finding a proven nonprofit that can be replicated locally saves time and money and begins to benefit people in the community faster, all while leveraging the experiences and learning of that program in their other locations. Setting the conditions to ensure the model becomes embedded and addresses that community’s nuances requires intentional support over several years along with facilitation of deep partnerships with local organisations. This ongoing commitment mitigates risk and will pay off in the long run.

John Simon is the co-founder and board chair at GreenLight Fund.