The Jeremiah Program of Minneapolis is now just weeks away from opening a new building where 35 more families will live while going through the nonprofit's intensive, "two-generation" program that gets single parents and their kids to permanently leave poverty behind.
What's most interesting about it is that it's in Austin, Texas, about a 17-hour drive down Interstate 35 from where Jeremiah got its start. This project represents the kind of national expansion that small, social-service nonprofits like Jeremiah aren't supposed to be able to pull off — or even try.
The people running Jeremiah have long been thinking about how best to expand, as "literally when we first opened our doors in 1998 we were getting calls" from other cities, said Gloria Perez, Jeremiah's longtime CEO.
The organization has refined its thinking since then — what they once called criteria they now call "the rubric." The expansion strategy boils down to just one powerful idea: The product has to be the same wherever Jeremiah goes, but the details of how it is delivered can be easily worked out with the supporters brought on board in new locations.
While a lot of organizations are tiny and stay that size, the idea of national expansion crops up a lot in nonprofit circles. Whenever a program starts demonstrating good outcomes on a really tough problem, a government official or philanthropist will ask if it can be "replicated" and plopped down somewhere else.
It's easy to understand the appeal of doing that. It's the same thinking that gets entrepreneurs to plunge into the restaurant business by buying a franchise. Yet it's just that kind of thinking that can lead to trouble in nonprofits.
Figuring out if there is a need for what a social service agency does is rarely the challenging part. The answer almost always is yes. Far more likely, a nonprofit eager to serve more people hasn't given enough thought to how it will keep itself funded at a new location.
Beyond having to build new relationships with local donors, the whole structure of the nonprofit fundraising market could be different in a new metro area. And organizations surely can't count on more money from their hometown. Local foundations might not be thrilled about seeing time and money go to a national rollout.