Resources
Getting Started on a Social Enterprise Journey: A Practical Guide for Nonprofits
With uncertain funding cycles and increasing cuts to assistance funding, many nonprofit organizations are asking themselves the same question: how do we build financial stability in a way that aligns with our mission instead of steering away from it? For civil society organizations working in sexual and reproductive health, at the frontline of getting care to the most vulnerable groups, that question has become especially urgent and acute.
For more than two decades, Fòs Feminista has worked closely with our civil society partner organizations to explore avenues to diversify revenue, including advancing mission aligned earned income activities. Through our Innovation and Social Enterprise Lab and Feminist Impact Fund, have worked with more than 30 partners spanning service providers and advocacy and education organizations who have explored, ideated, launched and scaled sustainable social enterprise models that increase access to sexual and reproductive care.
In 2026 we engaged The Bridgespan Group to assess the value created through years of social innovation work across our Alliance, and to distill the methods and approaches we have implemented and created with our partners, into an actionable tool that other civil society organizations could use. The result is a new practical guide: Getting Started on a Social Enterprise Journey.
The guide organizes what Fòs Feminista and our partners have learned from our work in social entrepreneurship into four practical questions any civil society or nonprofit organization can walk through to start a journey of earned income generation:
- What are your key strengths? — Start with what you already do well, not an entirely new idea.
- Is there real demand for what you offer? — Test assumptions with real customers before investing time and resources.
- What mindset shifts are needed to align revenue with your mission? — Reframe how your organization thinks about earned income, and surface the fears holding it back.
- What capacities and resources are required to make this work feasible? — Build the internal muscle needed to sustain it including financial modeling, marketing decisions, internal operations, and leadership alignment.
The guide draws on real experiences from partner organizations across the Fòs Feminista Alliance at very different stages of their own social enterprise journeys—from advocacy organizations exploring a small service delivery unit to large service providers seeking to scale and replicate their model in other geographies.