Nonprofits Sharpen Their Entrepreneurial Skills

The idea came from an environmentally savvy visitor who had consumed several tasty samples of New Orleans’ fried seafood: Recycle some of that shrimp po-boy cooking oil into fuel.

Now the Gulfsouth Youth Biodiesel Project, a program of the nonprofit organization Operation Reach, is turning that idea into a success story in social entrepreneurship.

The person who generated the spark for the project certainly had plenty to teach the group about business success. Ephren Taylor is a former teen entrepreneur who parlayed a homemade video game into a multimillion-dollar technology company by age 17 and later became the youngest African-American CEO ever to run a publicly traded company.
“He does a lot of community development work and also a lot with alternative energy,” said Hamilton Simons-Jones, chief development officer for Operation Reach. “He started sharing information about the process by which you can take used cooking oil and turn it into biodiesel fuel.”
Beginning last fall, Simons-Jones and other project leaders attended a six-month workshop designed to help nonprofit organizations develop social enterprises to become more financially self-sufficient. Conducted by Community Wealth Ventures, the workshops were funded by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations and the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation. Along with Operation Reach, six other local nonprofits were chosen to participate: the Contemporary Arts Center, Good Work Network, Louisiana Children’s Museum, Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, New Orleans Video Access Center and Project Lazarus.