Dan Bassill points out that businesses are trying to meet their need for skilled workers while nonprofits are trying to help kids develop their skills and leadership abilities so they can go on to higher education and higher incomes in the future. He suggests that the businesses ought to be paying us nonprofits to do the job for them instead of reinventing the wheel. Sounds good, in theory, but there are two related problems with this approach. One: increasingly, corporations are looking to put even their "philanthropic" money into programs that benefit their bottom line directly and measurably. (See "Philanthropy, Inc." by Keith Epstein in the current issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.) So, they are not interested in a lot of our less specialized programs. The article quotes the corporate contributions director at Raytheon, for instance, as saying, "We have engineers and scientists, and we need engineers and scientists. Why would we fund a program for nurses aides?" (The fact that the community they do business in may need nurses aides doesn't cut much ice with them. Second, we may not want their support if it comes with too many strings attached. Some corporations view philanthropy purely as PR, and taking their money may cost more than refusing it--and they won't care. Also, one of the time-tested, proven ways of raising people's income is by getting them into a union. Try doing that with corporate funding! All of which is not to say we shouldn't forge partnerships with progressive-minded businesses when it makes sense to do so--keeping both our mission and our bottom line in mind. It's just that there aren't as many good opportunities to do so as one might think.