SWAP is a community tool that enables non-profits to obtain the necessary resources and talents to support their current and ongoing mission-related needs through sharing. It allows participating non-profits to augment their organization's capacity without the added strains of fundraising and competition and provides a means for organizations to share their existing resources and talents among a collaborative of other non-profits.
The SWAP Project
The SWAP Project team is iteratively designing, assessing, and refining the tool in partnership with small-to-medium non-profit organizations that provide critical social and human services, particularly for historically marginalized and low-income communities. The SWAP tool improves the collective impact of the non-profit organizations and their work solving social problems.
The project aims to ensure that the platform remains a community tool that honors the time and talents of non-profit workers and enables non-profit organizations to share talents and resources in an inclusive, scalable, and fair way over time. The research team is also measuring the project's transformative impact on workers, non-profits, and the community, and is studying non-profit workers’ inter-workplace mobility experiences, the pursuit of meaningful work, and a sense of belonging and purpose.
SWAP is currently being piloted with non-profits in the Howard County, Maryland area, and plans are in place to expand to other non-profits through a collaborative co-design process. The Association of Community Services of Howard County is a special partner and we thank them for their help with this collaboration.
Acknowledgments
SWAP is deeply appreciative of Mike Mitchell for the initial idea and discussions. The SWAP Project is being supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers 2222713 and 2222697; SWAP also acknowledges and thanks John Brothers and the T. Rowe Price Foundation, who provided foundational support to get this project moving forward, as well as Barbara Shapiro, Paul Wolman, and the France Merrick Foundation for their support.
Please note that any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Additional Resources
Resource Sharing in Non-Profits
- Brothers, John (2021) “Sharing Sugar,” Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Collective Impact
- Kania, J., Williams, J., Schmitz, P., Brady, S., Kramer, M., & Juster, J. S. (2022). Centering equity in collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 20(1), 38-45.
Non-Profit Marketplace Applications
- Prendergast, C. (2017). How food banks use markets to feed the poor. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(4), 145-62.