To Achieve Sustainability, Build a Business, Not a Charity

This article is adapted by the author from a presentation to the National Microschool Founders and Leaders Summit at Nevada State University in October 2024

Starting anything—especially a school—is hard. You need a vision, a space, funding, curriculum, talented people, and you often must navigate a maze of bureaucracies and policies. It’s normal and completely reasonable to look for support in any place you can find it, including philanthropic institutions. As someone whose job it is to help founders via philanthropy, I’m always looking to see what patterns emerge when I ask founders questions like: What is the best thing about your work? What are your biggest challenges? What problem do you wish someone would solve for you? 

Their list of things going well are often things like: 

• The joy of working with the communities they get to serve
• The feeling of empowerment from getting to build something aligned to their vision
• The passion they feel about their daily work

Their challenges often boil down to:

• Barriers to entry, like zoning requirements and health inspections
• Balancing the roles of educator and administrator, which can feel exhausting
• Getting the resources (funding, materials, buildings) they need to fulfill their missions

When I hear these responses, I think about the word sustainability. What would it take for these founders to feel their work is sustainable? For me, sustainability means founders:

1. Serve the communities they aim to serve
2. Pay themselves and their employees a livable wage
3. Avoid burnout

If I hear a founder struggling with one or more of these and lacks a plan to address it, I sense trouble on the horizon. But I think the solution lies closer to home than they might think.

Families First

While there are many different parts of a successful school, above all, you need families who share your vision and are willing to pay for it. Without families, nothing else matters. Sustainability hinges on creating something so compelling that families will rearrange their lives to be part of it. Something they will drive across a city or county to get to. Something they will pay you a living wage to get access to. The value you provide to your families is thus directly tied to your own long-term sustainability. And therefore, in all you do, families must remain at the core. 

What Sustainability Isn’t

While sustainability can mean different things for different founders and there are many ways to get there, there are things that I think will take you away from sustainability:

1. Scaling up to serve more kids, even if being small is your strength
2. Taking public funding, even if it means accepting overly burdensome rules and regulations
3. Expanding your mission to serve everyone, even if you’re passionate about a specific community

Unfortunately, these are often the conditions of philanthropic support, for whom "scaling" can sometimes be the most important form of impact.

The Risks of Philanthropy

Along with distracting you from your most important customers, philanthropy is a fundamentally risky thing to bet on. Philanthropy is fickle. Strategies shift, budgets shrink, and priorities change. On top of this, few philanthropies support organizations from inception to maturity, meaning you are constantly searching for a new set of supporters. And the more time you spend chasing philanthropic dollars, the more philanthropy, not families, becomes your focus. But when philanthropy becomes the primary customer, you risk being dragged away from your vision. My advice is this: founders should treat philanthropy as a bonus—helpful if aligned but NEVER essential. At Stand Together Trust, we encourage founders to share their most ambitious and high-risk ideas—experiments they believe 1) could be transformative and 2) won’t require additional funding beyond the pilot/startup phase. This approach helps ensure we avoid fostering dependence between us and the organizations we support.

Build a Business, not a Charity

Sustainability means building a business, not a charity. If families love your school and pay enough for you to earn a reasonable living without burning yourself out, you gain freedom:

• Freedom to grow on your timeline, not someone else’s
• Freedom to focus on your mission, not someone else's
• Freedom to build with your families, not outsiders

This freedom—the kind felt by all successful entrepreneurs—fosters sustainability and empowers you to lead. But this is a freedom that only comes when you don’t need philanthropy. For you to achieve long-term success, you must build a business, not a charity. 

An Example: Chesterton Academies

Consider Chesterton Schools Network, a network of parent-led Catholic classical high school microschools. At their most recent annual conference I attended, they shared two principles for founders:

1. Each school should strive to hold 100% of operating funds in reserve prior to each academic year (i.e., raise the fundraising gap one year in advance).
2. Over time, the school should strive to meet the annual operating budget through 70% tuition revenue and 30% fundraising revenue.

By constraining both the amount of philanthropy schools should take and the timing by which the funding must be raised, Chesterton ensures fiscal discipline and aligns school operations with sustainability. In living these values, Chesterton builds long-term trust with families who know what to expect every school year.

What does sustainability mean to you?

If you’re running a microschool or any school, I encourage you to ask yourself:

• Are you paying yourself enough to live on?
• Are you focused on your mission (and not someone else’s)?
• Are you excited about your work and not feeling burned out?

If you said yes to everything above, congratulations and I’d love to hear the story of how you got there. If not, I'd encourage you to think about the families you are serving and how you can serve them better. The path to sustainability lies with them and the value you create—not with philanthropy.