It takes a lot of heart to run a nonprofit, but a new program supported, in part, by the city of Beaverton aims to give nonprofits the business tools they need to stay afloat.

To help up-and-coming nonprofits, the city of Beaverton has teamed up with the Beaverton Area Chamber of Commerce and the Oregon Startup Center to launch the Nonprofit Incubator of Beaverton program, which is designed to give a helping hand to nonprofits trying to gain visibility in the community.

Mark Lewis, chamber director of nonprofit services and small business development, said inspiration for the program came from Mayor Lacey Beaty.

“The Nonprofit Incubator is the brainchild of Mayor Beaty,” Lewis said. “She comes with a nonprofit background and she was seeing the need for nonprofits to treat their nonprofits a little bit more like a business.”

Noting that nonprofits tend to lead with their hearts, Lewis said, “They do phenomenal programming that serves the needs in the community and creates a healthier, happier community by the types of services that they provide.”

Yet nonprofits need to be sustainable.

“They need to make sure that they have the right systems and processes in place so that they can increase their impact, as well as increase their sustainability over the long term,” Lewis said, noting that over half of the nonprofits fail within five years, according to Forbes. “And I think that number is probably much more dire than that.”

Lewis said other factors that may weigh on a nonprofit include leadership, whether it may be the board or executive director, diversification of the funding stream and failing to adapt to a changing environment.

“A lot of our nonprofits are facing a lot of difficulties as different funding streams, particularly federal funding streams, are drying up,” he said. “That’s a real challenge. Some of their stakeholders or beneficiaries are feeling targeted, particularly those in our more marginalized communities, our immigrant and refugees, our LGBTQIA community, our disabled folks — there is a lot of fear and unsettling in that community.”

Lewis said the Nonprofit Incubator of Beaverton program will help nonprofits create a business plan tailored to the nonprofit culture. According to Lewis, the cultures between the business and nonprofit worlds are quite different, even if they are both corporations.

“We’ll be working to help them develop really strong business plans,” he said.

Lewis said the program will cater to nonprofits that have less than a half a million dollars in annual revenue and that employ fewer than 25 employees.

The incubator program will be housed at the Beaverton Building, on the third floor of the executive suites, after renovations complete in June.

Nonprofits interested in working with the incubator program can submit applications to npi-b.org, or reach out to Lewis at mark@beaverton.org .

“The idea here is that the city believes strongly in supporting for–profits and nonprofits,” he said. “We work closely with the Oregon Startup Center, which has a long history of incubating traded-sector businesses largely in the tech industry… We’ll be working side by side, here in that incubator space, as a shared space, for both for-profits and nonprofits.”