Some time last year I was introduced to the term "social enterprise". This is an organization, I suppose it could be a for-profit but most often a nonprofit, whose mission is to serve the community but also to earn income that helps sustain the organization. It took a while for me to grasp the term social enterprise until I realized that that was what my organization had become over the last several years, whether we called it that or not.
I was "loaned" to SDFF in 2000 while working for SAIC, a large, for-profit and employee-owned engineering and contracting company based in San Diego. Honestly, I didn't know much about nonprofits other than the few networking groups I had joined and participated in over the years (I actually started one called the San Diego Digital Media Association prior to the advent of the Netscape browser but I'll save that story for later).
SDFF's mission is/was to close the digital divide in San Diego. We accomplish this by taking computers that the County of San Diego is replacing, refurbishing them, and donating them to SD nonprofits, schools, and families. For the first several years, that's all we did; give away computers. But having a technical and particularly services background, it made sense to me that we should offer technical services and any other kind of service that fit with our mission, for a fee. Our Board at the time wasn't completely interested, but things changed.
