Advancing Nonprofit Sustainability through Service Learning

The strength of our service-learning project has been our development of partnerships with nonprofit community service agencies, many of which were start-up businesses. The discipline in which we enjoyed the greatest success was Small Business Management. We targeted nonprofit organizations in part because of the economic downturn and had more interest and requests than we had capacity to respond to. Students in the Small Business Management class assisted nonprofits with the development of their business plans designed to enhance or expand their services or programs. Four groups of students and one individual student assisted five nonprofit entities with the development of business plans. The partner interviewed for this article is Alaska's Unique Riders Overcoming Risk & Adversity (AURORA). The mission of AURORA is "to develop and promote awareness of equine therapy in Alaska." AURORA provides education, riding programs, and other activities for the benefit of individuals with physical, psychological, emotional, or other disabilities. In like manner, AURORA provides community members opportunities to get involved in an endeavor that promotes a positive and safe environment for at‐risk youth. [author]