essential nonprofit
JustDane
Innovation Incubator by Kyle Jacobson
Though all nonprofits focus on their individual missions, from education to recreation and healthcare to home repair, they’re simultaneously improving the lives of everyone in their communities by addressing underfunded or inadequately met needs. But even with around 3,000 nonprofits in Dane County and 19,000 public charities across the state, the undertaking is often larger than many of us appreciate. As a nonprofit with 50 years under its belt, JustDane amplifies its impact by dedicating some of its resources toward functioning as a nonprofit incubator. They have their own programs to achieve their mission statement—to transform individual lives and social systems to create a just and equitable community—but they can better meet their aim by working as a fiscal agent 36 | m a d i s o n e s s e n t i a l s
and providing administrative services to those who share in their vision. When deciding whether to take on a new nonprofit, Executive Director Linda Ketcham says, “First and foremost, the board looks at how does that align with our mission statement. ... The board also looks at how much of my time or how much of an office administrator’s time being a fiscal agent might take and whether we feel like we have the capacity to do that. ... Typically the goal is that the group would spinoff and become its own nonprofit so that it doesn’t necessarily stay housed under us forever. That then frees us up to provide that function for another idea or another group.” It’s not hard to imagine that there’s a wide variety of services different
