A strategy we have suggested be looked at in relation to helping the Parkway (specifically under the management of a nonprofit organization) is examined here; and raises many excellent questions that any consideration of using the strategy should be answering.
An excerpt.
Getting to the Bottom of "Bottom-Up" Approaches
The Brookings Institution, October 2006
Joseph S. O'Keefe, Writer-in-Residence, Global Economy and Development
Now that Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for developing and promoting microfinance banking to help the poor, the media spotlight will shine on his pioneering model.
The Grameen Bank success in Bangladesh with "bottom-up" aid in the form of small loans deserves lavish praise. What's not to like? Countless disempowered people, primarily women, have been lifted out of poverty through the opportunity to become small entrepreneurs and access financial services for the first time. Equally important is the fact that this model has inspired a generation of idealistic young entrepreneurs in the rich nations to flock to this approach.
The idea of harnessing the power of the marketplace to help solve the world's social, political, and environmental problems—through microfinance banks, "social enterprises," and the like—goes back at least as far as 1462, when an Italian monk opened a pawn shop to counter local usury practices. But it has never been hotter.
Two decades ago, for example, you would be hard-pressed to find a single business or public policy graduate school program devoted to such an agenda. Today, there are some 50 such programs and counting, and their ranks include top-tier universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford.
A recent study by the University of Maryland found that "asset-based" social institutions that combine lending, financing, and other profitable activities with social aims now represent more than $1.5 trillion in assets in the U.S. alone.
Social enterprises have become so pervasive that several years ago Britain developed a special oversight unit and a formal strategy to incorporate such activities into long-range public sector planning.
Yet this trend deserves much more scrutiny. The returns from this new social marketplace, while encouraging and even inspiring in places, often come closer to "random walk" variability than a Buffett-like bonanza.
Far too little before-and-after research has been conducted on the actual social and developmental impact of such enterprises. The vast majority of social enterprises, especially those in the developing world, are still too young to demonstrate conclusive results, and most such enterprises have never reached scale. Thus one can fairly question whether a dollar going to create a new social enterprise has the same impact as, say, a dollar for an existing humanitarian relief program.
