3foldComm

We were truly honored here at 3fold when we found out the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce selected us as the Small Business of the Year today. It was a wonderful surprise and the team here is elated to say the least.

We are not ones to toot our own horns at all but we do have to say a great team and incredible clients made this all possible. The news was our late Thanksgiving treat and our early Christmas gift and a great way to wrap up an exciting 2011.

Why is the award such a big deal to us? The Metro Chamber does a great job of recognizing individuals and businesses for excellence not only in business leadership but the commitment to our community.

There are plenty of deserving businesses in the area, so to be selected is an incredible honor and speaks volumes about what we have accomplished this last year and sets our sights higher for 2012.

A big 3fold “thank you” goes out to the Sacramento Metro Chamber for the award, congratulations to the other winners and most of all, a big thank you to our clients – without you all, this wouldn’t be possible.

Stay tuned for bigger and better things next year Sacramento!

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Nonprofit visionary Robert Egger was in town to help kick off the inaugural 3fold Spark! Series last Friday aimed at uniting innovators within the local non-profit community. Egger founded the DC Central Kitchen in Washington, D.C. as the country’s first “community kitchen” where food donated by hospitality businesses and farms is used to fuel a nationally recognized culinary arts job training program, where unemployed men and women learn marketable skills while donations are converted into balanced meals.

With over 23 million meals served and over 800 men and woman trained and gaining full-time employment, Egger’s philosophy helped turn the dream of a socially responsible business into a reality. Egger also penned the award-winning book Begging for Change: The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits Responsive, Efficient and Rewarding for All.

At Friday’s roundtable, Egger shared his passion with leaders from Sacramento’s nonprofit community, asking them to start thinking about social responsibility and treating organizations more as a social enterprise than a “not for profit.” With a shift from a manufacturing orientated society into a service oriented society, our view on quality of life, wealth and social responsibility are changing and so does the way we traditionally have gone about treating the traditional nonprofit.

As the Baby Boomer generation ages and the Millennial generation reaches the workforce, there is a crossroads where the two generations are meeting that will have a major impact on the way nonprofit agencies exist in the future. As Eggers pointed out, this brings around change — change that some are willing to embrace wholeheartedly, while others may resist. “Our generation chose to drop out and rage against the machine. This generation can drop in and take over,” he adds.

This evolving way of thinking across all generations is a good sign for the nonprofit community as philanthropy and a return to the need for “community” and belonging. But nonprofits also need to reevaluate and grow as well to be successful in the future. To thrive, nonprofits have to adopt the mechanics needed to run a business for its longevity.

“Robert Egger challenges us to ‘march out and meet the future,’ and that’s exactly what the Spark! series is intended to do,” said Kim Tucker, Vice President of Nonprofit Services at 3fold. “Let’s do as Robert did at DC Central Kitchen and move around the existing ingredients –- our leading nonprofit organizations and our forward-thinking funders –- and innovate in our responses to community needs.”

With the tagline “Where Coffee Meets Inspiration,” the 3fold Spark! series is a quarterly roundtable speaker event bringing together a variety of voices from the nonprofit community to Sacramento.

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