More than 60 community, philanthropic and non-profit leaders came together at Proctors' Fenimore Gallery today to participate in the Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region's Strategic Alliance event.
This event celebrated and examined how the successful alliance between Proctor's and the Capital Repertory Theatre became a reality through nearly $250,000 in funding support from regional leaders, who themselves collaborated on behalf of the region's arts and cultural needs.
The event also encouraged and enabled future innovation and collaboration among non-profits through facilitated discussion with a panel of experts, along with networking and a monetary incentive for organizations to generate ideas for cooperative efforts. A $2500 cash award was made available for the best idea developed from the event, and a fund established by the Community Foundation was highlighted as a mechanism for future investments to support collaboration.
"We see many non-profits that are struggling to stay afloat, and collaboration is becoming an increasingly critical strategy to position them positively for the future," said Karen Bilowith, the Community Foundation's President & CEO. "We produced this event to open the doors for opportunity by educating, connecting organizations, and providing a framework for future funding."
Proctors and the Capital Repertory Theatre demonstrated a successful initiative that leveraged their organizational assets and community support to drive sustainable improvements in their bottom lines. "Our alliance with the Capital Repertory Theatre is an important regional example of what is possible," said Philip Morris, CEO of Proctors. "I'm delighted to have this opportunity to celebrate the hard work and creative thinking that helped strengthen both of our organizations. Together with my good friend, Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill (Artistic Director, Capital Repertory Theatre) we thank the community leaders that supported us and hope to inspire other non-profits to follow and enjoy similar success."
The support for this endeavor came via a grassroots team of businesses, philanthropists and family foundations who were convened by KeyBank to discuss ways they could work together on behalf of challenged arts and cultural organizations in the Capital Region. They decided to support institutions who were interested in strengthening themselves by working with other non-profits. The opportunity emerged to help Proctors grow and be able to take on the management of Capital Repertory Theatre as an important step to stabilize the struggling Albany theatre. More than a dozen donors engaged in the review of this opportunity and raised approximately $250,000 necessary to help the organizations align under a new business model. The model consolidated all key back office processes from development to marketing and finance, and leveraged a new common ticketing system that Proctors has made available for others to use.
"Arts & cultural organizations are vital to fuel creativity, enhance quality of life, and attract and retain the talent we need in our region for continued growth," noted Jeffrey Stone, President, KeyBank. "We were looking to facilitate a strong collaboration initiative to help sustain the arts," added Stone. "I'm proud of what we accomplished so far and look forward to working with the next generation of non-profits to build on this foundation."
"I left this event feeling encouraged," commented Paul Fahey, the Children's Museum of Science and Technology Board Chair and participant in Tuesday's event. "Our board and staff have been interested in this type of collaboration but wanted to learn more about the opportunities, process and pitfalls. This event really helped give us the ideas and inspiration to see what's possible and how we can make that happen with our peers in the region."
Looking forward, Karen Bilowith was excited to suggest that, "there is strong interest to continue funding this type of initiative. The Community Foundation provided the mechanism for funding these opportunities and will provide similar support for other endeavors. This is an important trend for the sustainability of our arts and cultural community and the seeds that were planted in conversations today are likely to blossom into major initiatives for the region going forward."
ABOUT THE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FOR THE GREATER CAPITAL REGION
Since 1968, The Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region has provided an effective means for people who care about this community to be part of shaping its future. The Community Foundation offers donors a complete toolkit for charitable giving, expert assistance in learning more about the causes they care about, and the opportunity to join others with similar interests to learn and give together.
The Community Foundation distributed more than $3 million in 2011 to hundreds of not-for-profit organizations in the Capital Region and beyond. With assets of $51 million, the Foundation is comprised of more than 340 charitable funds created by a diverse group of individuals, families, and corporations. In addition, two local independent foundations, the Bender Family Foundation and the Equinox Foundation, contract with the Community Foundation for grantmaking assistance.
Through flexible donor services, strategic grantmaking, and community leadership, the Community Foundation helps people support the causes they care about, now and for generations to come. For more information, please visit us online at www.cfgcr.org or call 518-446-9638.
Showing posts with label NewModels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NewModels. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Growing Interest in "Taxing" Nonprofits
The NY Times featured a recent story about the growing trend of municipalities developing or charging nonprofits service fees (aka taxes on certain services). Clearly this is a challenge for most nonprofits, especially as they struggle to address increasing needs, higher operating costs and decreasing funding and donations. It seems that nonprofits will likely cut services in response, especially since most have already cut everything possible in an attempt to preserve programs and services. What kind of impact this will have remains to be seen, but it feels like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
The article relates:
As recession-racked cities struggle to balance their budgets with everything short of feeling behind sofa cushions for loose change, a growing number are seeking more money — just don’t use the word taxes — from nonprofit institutions that occupy valuable land but by law do not pay property taxes.
Boston has been sending letters to its largest nonprofit institutions this year, telling them the value of their land and asking them to begin making annual payments that would eventually rise to a quarter of what they would owe if they paid property taxes. Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel of Chicago wants the city to begin charging water fees to nonprofits, which have been spared them in the past. And the mayor of Providence, R.I., Angel Taveras, cited Boston’s example this month when he called on nonprofits to pay more money to the city.
Read more here.
The article relates:
As recession-racked cities struggle to balance their budgets with everything short of feeling behind sofa cushions for loose change, a growing number are seeking more money — just don’t use the word taxes — from nonprofit institutions that occupy valuable land but by law do not pay property taxes.
Boston has been sending letters to its largest nonprofit institutions this year, telling them the value of their land and asking them to begin making annual payments that would eventually rise to a quarter of what they would owe if they paid property taxes. Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel of Chicago wants the city to begin charging water fees to nonprofits, which have been spared them in the past. And the mayor of Providence, R.I., Angel Taveras, cited Boston’s example this month when he called on nonprofits to pay more money to the city.
Read more here.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Museumwise & MANY investigate a joint service model
The Museumwise & MANY boards have agreed to pursue an investigation into the blending of our two organizations. To continue to enhance our impact on New York's museum community, we recognized the need to think creatively towards envisioning a new model of service. The goal of our collaborative investigations is to identify the most appropriate model for both organizations to best serve their members and the cultural community. A second but equally import goal is its potential to serve as a model for other organizations should they choose to pursue this form of creative exploration and envisioning. Member and stakeholder input are a top priority to both Museumwise and MANY. The development of an open, comprehensive and balanced conduit for member and stakeholder participation is recognized as an integral element in this venture. We will be coming to you for your ideas and feedback once our communication plan is more clearly defined. Best regards, Catherine ************************************************ Catherine Gilbert, Executive Director Museumwise 11 Ford Avenue Oneonta, NY 13820 800-895-1648 director@museumwise.org http://www.museumwise.org/ http://www.museumsinconversation.org/
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Google Finds It Hard to Reinvent Philanthropy
The NY Times featured a recent article on Google and their philanthropy efforts and predictions that they were going to change the game:
JUST before Google first sold its shares to the public in 2004, Larry Page, one of its founders, excited the nonprofit world with a bold commitment to philanthropy.
He vowed to dedicate about 1 percent of Google’s profits, 1 percent of its equity and a significant amount of its employees’ time to the effort, which became known as Google.org, or simply DotOrg. “We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to potential investors.
Although Google intended to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases, it declared that DotOrg would not be “conventional” — a four-letter word in Google-speak. For starters, the organization would operate in part as a business, thus freeing itself from various constraints placed on nonprofit groups.
Google hired Larry Brilliant, a public health expert and Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no experience running a major philanthropy, to lead DotOrg, which was set up as a business unit within the company. It then poached prominent experts in development, energy and public health from prestigious institutions like the Aga Khan Foundation, Goldman Sachs and the International Water Management Institute.
“Google.org can play the entire keyboard,” Dr. Brilliant said in an interview with The New York Times shortly after his appointment. “It can start companies, build industries, pay consultants, lobby, give money to individuals and make a profit.”
Nearly five years later, however, the hyperbole looks more like hubris. DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks.
The company’s top executives rarely mention DotOrg, which is now run by Megan Smith, a business development executive who devotes only part of her time to the organization.
Although Google gives tens of millions of dollars to charity each year and says the overall company is meeting its 1 percent giving goal, DotOrg itself is no longer making grants to nonprofit groups or financing new companies. Instead, it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments.
Google says it has changed its approach to philanthropy, but not its scope or ambition. Ms. Smith readily acknowledges that the organization has yet to prove itself, but she says it has already had a positive impact in various areas, such as public health and the environment.
“We are a start-up,” Ms. Smith said in a recent interview. “The aspirational goals in the founding of DotOrg are long term. Our hope is to get to that point where we could have the impact that our founders hoped.”
In the philanthropy world, many people have a more skeptical view of Google’s experiment.
“I think there were from the beginning two competing ideas about what DotOrg would be,” said Joshua Cohen, a professor of law, politics and philosophy at Stanford who, after DotOrg was formed, was hired to create seminars to educate Googlers on issues bedeviling developing countries. “The first was a Googley idea that DotOrg would completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find.”
The second idea, Professor Cohen said, was more modest: “that DotOrg could make some headway, maybe a little, maybe a lot, in addressing these really big problems by doing what Google as a company is really good at doing, which is to say, aggregating information.”
“The second idea,” he continued, “won out.”
NOTHING illustrates DotOrg’s approach better than Google Flu Trends, an innovative tool that uses data collected from searches about flu symptoms to predict the location of flu outbreaks. In April 2009, Dr. Brilliant said it epitomized the power of Google’s vaunted engineering prowess to make the world a better place, and he predicted that it would save untold numbers of lives.
Public health officials say the tool is undoubtedly useful.
But “on an individual basis, does Flu Trends save lives? No,” said Ashley LaMonte-Fowlkes, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped Google test and develop it.
Instead, she described it as “a really nice adjunct” to other tools that the agency uses to understand the spread of flu. One major shortcoming of Flu Trends is that in poor regions of the developing world, where devastating pandemics are most likely to start, computers are not widely available, so Google has little data to feed into the tool. Even in the United States, during the swine flu outbreak of 2009, Flu Trends had difficulty detecting the relatively small number of H1N1 infections.
Some veterans of DotOrg say Flu Trends is an example of how Google’s engineering-centric approach frustrated and limited them.
Read more here.
JUST before Google first sold its shares to the public in 2004, Larry Page, one of its founders, excited the nonprofit world with a bold commitment to philanthropy.
He vowed to dedicate about 1 percent of Google’s profits, 1 percent of its equity and a significant amount of its employees’ time to the effort, which became known as Google.org, or simply DotOrg. “We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to potential investors.
Although Google intended to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases, it declared that DotOrg would not be “conventional” — a four-letter word in Google-speak. For starters, the organization would operate in part as a business, thus freeing itself from various constraints placed on nonprofit groups.
Google hired Larry Brilliant, a public health expert and Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no experience running a major philanthropy, to lead DotOrg, which was set up as a business unit within the company. It then poached prominent experts in development, energy and public health from prestigious institutions like the Aga Khan Foundation, Goldman Sachs and the International Water Management Institute.
“Google.org can play the entire keyboard,” Dr. Brilliant said in an interview with The New York Times shortly after his appointment. “It can start companies, build industries, pay consultants, lobby, give money to individuals and make a profit.”
Nearly five years later, however, the hyperbole looks more like hubris. DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks.
The company’s top executives rarely mention DotOrg, which is now run by Megan Smith, a business development executive who devotes only part of her time to the organization.
Although Google gives tens of millions of dollars to charity each year and says the overall company is meeting its 1 percent giving goal, DotOrg itself is no longer making grants to nonprofit groups or financing new companies. Instead, it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments.
Google says it has changed its approach to philanthropy, but not its scope or ambition. Ms. Smith readily acknowledges that the organization has yet to prove itself, but she says it has already had a positive impact in various areas, such as public health and the environment.
“We are a start-up,” Ms. Smith said in a recent interview. “The aspirational goals in the founding of DotOrg are long term. Our hope is to get to that point where we could have the impact that our founders hoped.”
In the philanthropy world, many people have a more skeptical view of Google’s experiment.
“I think there were from the beginning two competing ideas about what DotOrg would be,” said Joshua Cohen, a professor of law, politics and philosophy at Stanford who, after DotOrg was formed, was hired to create seminars to educate Googlers on issues bedeviling developing countries. “The first was a Googley idea that DotOrg would completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find.”
The second idea, Professor Cohen said, was more modest: “that DotOrg could make some headway, maybe a little, maybe a lot, in addressing these really big problems by doing what Google as a company is really good at doing, which is to say, aggregating information.”
“The second idea,” he continued, “won out.”
NOTHING illustrates DotOrg’s approach better than Google Flu Trends, an innovative tool that uses data collected from searches about flu symptoms to predict the location of flu outbreaks. In April 2009, Dr. Brilliant said it epitomized the power of Google’s vaunted engineering prowess to make the world a better place, and he predicted that it would save untold numbers of lives.
Public health officials say the tool is undoubtedly useful.
But “on an individual basis, does Flu Trends save lives? No,” said Ashley LaMonte-Fowlkes, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped Google test and develop it.
Instead, she described it as “a really nice adjunct” to other tools that the agency uses to understand the spread of flu. One major shortcoming of Flu Trends is that in poor regions of the developing world, where devastating pandemics are most likely to start, computers are not widely available, so Google has little data to feed into the tool. Even in the United States, during the swine flu outbreak of 2009, Flu Trends had difficulty detecting the relatively small number of H1N1 infections.
Some veterans of DotOrg say Flu Trends is an example of how Google’s engineering-centric approach frustrated and limited them.
Read more here.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Deadline is Dec 1 for Knight News Challenge media innovation contest
If you have an innovative media technology idea, you might be able to get funding from the Knight News Challenge contest.
Run by the Knight Foundation, the grant competition awards up to $5 million annually for innovative projects that use digital technology to transform the way communities send, receive and make use of news and information.
More info can be found here: http://newschallenge.org. The site includes application information, as well as details about past winners.
This year's application deadline is December 1. The News Challenge is looking for applications in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.
The contest is open to anyone in the world.
A simple description of the project is all you need to apply. Submit a brief pitch to http://newschallenge.org. If the reviewers like it, you'll be asked to submit a full proposal later.
Run by the Knight Foundation, the grant competition awards up to $5 million annually for innovative projects that use digital technology to transform the way communities send, receive and make use of news and information.
More info can be found here: http://newschallenge.org. The site includes application information, as well as details about past winners.
This year's application deadline is December 1. The News Challenge is looking for applications in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.
The contest is open to anyone in the world.
A simple description of the project is all you need to apply. Submit a brief pitch to http://newschallenge.org. If the reviewers like it, you'll be asked to submit a full proposal later.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
New Tools For Measuring Impact!
The Foundation Center, the nation's leading authority on philanthropy, has launched an online database of proven approaches to measuring and analyzing the impact of social investments. As philanthropists and the nonprofit community shift towards more strategic approaches to get a "social return," evaluation activities must also operate at a higher level. TRASI ("Tools and Resources for Assessing Social Impact") addresses these growing needs by offering tools and methodologies that place a premium on evidence and metrics in tracking progress.
"Measuring the effectiveness of social programs has always been a challenge because it's not just about the numbers. TRASI helps organizations meet that challenge and go beyond simply determining whether projected outcomes were achieved," said Lawrence T. McGill, the Foundation Center's vice president for research. "The organizations that have generously shared their own strategic methods for measuring impact will greatly help others to find a solution that is a good fit for them."
Developed in partnership with McKinsey & Co., the assessment approaches in TRASI were authored by a range of organizations, including social investors, foundations, NGOs, and microfinance institutions. The Better Business Bureau, USAID, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy are among them. The resources in the database range from off-the-shelf tools and concrete methodologies to generalized best practices and are complemented by multimedia features and social networking tools.
Each approach has been carefully indexed against a common set of key elements and presented in a way that makes it easy to compare their relative merits. The key elements include: who the approach applies to, what kind of organization or evaluation the approach is best suited for, and the costs and techniques involved in its implementation. Each approach was thoroughly reviewed by an Expert Review Panel convened by the New York University Stern School of Business.
Online Kick-off Event
The Center is hosting an online event to kick-off the TRASI launch. Beginning at 2:00 pm EDT on Wednesday, September 22, 2010, a live chat with some of the individuals from the Expert Review Panel will be held. Anyone interested in learning more about impact assessment and the TRASI platform is invited to attend by visiting http://trasicommunity.ning.com/.
About the Foundation Center
Established in 1956 and today supported by close to 550 foundations, the Foundation Center is the nation's leading authority on philanthropy, connecting nonprofits and the grantmakers supporting them to tools they can use and information they can trust. The Center maintains the most comprehensive database on U.S. and, increasingly, global grantmakers and their grants — a robust, accessible knowledge bank for the sector. It also operates research, education, and training programs designed to advance knowledge of philanthropy at every level. Thousands of people visit the Center's web site each day and are served in its five regional library/learning centers and its network of 450 funding information centers located in public libraries, community foundations, and educational institutions nationwide and beyond. For more information, please visit http://www.foundationcenter.org/ or call (212) 620-4230.
"Measuring the effectiveness of social programs has always been a challenge because it's not just about the numbers. TRASI helps organizations meet that challenge and go beyond simply determining whether projected outcomes were achieved," said Lawrence T. McGill, the Foundation Center's vice president for research. "The organizations that have generously shared their own strategic methods for measuring impact will greatly help others to find a solution that is a good fit for them."
Developed in partnership with McKinsey & Co., the assessment approaches in TRASI were authored by a range of organizations, including social investors, foundations, NGOs, and microfinance institutions. The Better Business Bureau, USAID, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy are among them. The resources in the database range from off-the-shelf tools and concrete methodologies to generalized best practices and are complemented by multimedia features and social networking tools.
Each approach has been carefully indexed against a common set of key elements and presented in a way that makes it easy to compare their relative merits. The key elements include: who the approach applies to, what kind of organization or evaluation the approach is best suited for, and the costs and techniques involved in its implementation. Each approach was thoroughly reviewed by an Expert Review Panel convened by the New York University Stern School of Business.
Online Kick-off Event
The Center is hosting an online event to kick-off the TRASI launch. Beginning at 2:00 pm EDT on Wednesday, September 22, 2010, a live chat with some of the individuals from the Expert Review Panel will be held. Anyone interested in learning more about impact assessment and the TRASI platform is invited to attend by visiting http://trasicommunity.ning.com/.
About the Foundation Center
Established in 1956 and today supported by close to 550 foundations, the Foundation Center is the nation's leading authority on philanthropy, connecting nonprofits and the grantmakers supporting them to tools they can use and information they can trust. The Center maintains the most comprehensive database on U.S. and, increasingly, global grantmakers and their grants — a robust, accessible knowledge bank for the sector. It also operates research, education, and training programs designed to advance knowledge of philanthropy at every level. Thousands of people visit the Center's web site each day and are served in its five regional library/learning centers and its network of 450 funding information centers located in public libraries, community foundations, and educational institutions nationwide and beyond. For more information, please visit http://www.foundationcenter.org/ or call (212) 620-4230.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Panera Co. to open more pay-what-you-wish eateries
Syracuse.com offered the following national story:
As the first crowd of customers filed into Panera Co.'s nonprofit restaurant here, only the honor system kept them from taking all the food they wanted for free.
Ronald Shaich, Panera's chairman, admitted as he watched them line up that he had no idea if his experiment would work. The idea for Panera's first nonprofit restaurant was to open an eatery where people paid what they could. The richer could pay full price-or extra. The poorer could get a cheap or even free meal.
A month later, the verdict is in: It turns out people are basically good.
Panera, which operates 1,400 franchised and corporate-owned bakery-cafes across the country, plans to expand the nonprofit model around the nation, opening two more locations within months.
"I guess I would say it's performing better than we even might have hoped in our cynical moments, and it's living up to our best sense of humanity," Shaich said in an interview.
Its cashiers tell customers their orders' "suggested" price based on the menu. About 60 to 70 percent pay in full, Shaich said. About 15 percent leave a little more and another 15 percent pay less, or nothing at all. A handful have left big donations, like $20 for a cup of coffee.
The restaurant took in $100,000 in revenue its first month. He declined to say what kind of margin this left between total costs and revenue, but he predicted the restaurant will be able to cover its costs within months and eventually generate extra cash for charitable programs.
Panera's nonprofit plan is the largest example yet of a concept called community kitchens, where businesses operate partly as charities. Customers who need a discount, or even free food, can get it with no questions asked.
Shaich borrowed the idea from a restaurant in Denver and then connected with Denise Cerreta, who runs The One World Salt Lake City restaurant with a sliding scale menu. Cerreta's community kitchen and others he looked into were impressive, Shaich said, but operated on a smaller scale than Panera could afford to run.
The Clayton store is run under the company's St. Louis Bread Co. banner by a nonprofit organization called Panera Cares that publicly traded Panera Co. supports. But Panera won't bear the nonprofit's losses if the experiment fails. For the expansion, Panera spokeswoman Kate Antonacci said, the nonprofit is considering locations that, like Clayton, are upscale but accessible to lower-income customers. In Clayton's case, St. Louis County's offices and court house are nearby. Read more here.
As the first crowd of customers filed into Panera Co.'s nonprofit restaurant here, only the honor system kept them from taking all the food they wanted for free.
Ronald Shaich, Panera's chairman, admitted as he watched them line up that he had no idea if his experiment would work. The idea for Panera's first nonprofit restaurant was to open an eatery where people paid what they could. The richer could pay full price-or extra. The poorer could get a cheap or even free meal.
A month later, the verdict is in: It turns out people are basically good.
Panera, which operates 1,400 franchised and corporate-owned bakery-cafes across the country, plans to expand the nonprofit model around the nation, opening two more locations within months.
"I guess I would say it's performing better than we even might have hoped in our cynical moments, and it's living up to our best sense of humanity," Shaich said in an interview.
Its cashiers tell customers their orders' "suggested" price based on the menu. About 60 to 70 percent pay in full, Shaich said. About 15 percent leave a little more and another 15 percent pay less, or nothing at all. A handful have left big donations, like $20 for a cup of coffee.
The restaurant took in $100,000 in revenue its first month. He declined to say what kind of margin this left between total costs and revenue, but he predicted the restaurant will be able to cover its costs within months and eventually generate extra cash for charitable programs.
Panera's nonprofit plan is the largest example yet of a concept called community kitchens, where businesses operate partly as charities. Customers who need a discount, or even free food, can get it with no questions asked.
Shaich borrowed the idea from a restaurant in Denver and then connected with Denise Cerreta, who runs The One World Salt Lake City restaurant with a sliding scale menu. Cerreta's community kitchen and others he looked into were impressive, Shaich said, but operated on a smaller scale than Panera could afford to run.
The Clayton store is run under the company's St. Louis Bread Co. banner by a nonprofit organization called Panera Cares that publicly traded Panera Co. supports. But Panera won't bear the nonprofit's losses if the experiment fails. For the expansion, Panera spokeswoman Kate Antonacci said, the nonprofit is considering locations that, like Clayton, are upscale but accessible to lower-income customers. In Clayton's case, St. Louis County's offices and court house are nearby. Read more here.
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