University of Maryland, Baltimore, T. Rowe Price Foundation to create nonprofit incubator

T. Rowe Price Foundation President John Brothers saw firsthand how the collapse of a nonprofit incubator can decimate the goals of dozens of entrepreneurs.

Now Brothers and T. Rowe Price is launching a partnership with the University of Maryland, Baltimore to fill the void left by Strong City Baltimore with a new incubator that will help fledgling nonprofits gain access to funding and services. Strong City Baltimore stopped serving as a fiscal sponsor to nonprofits after coming under fire for bad accounting practices in 2021. The organization handled around $14 million of revenue for its portfolio of 150 nonprofit projects.

"It was devastating, some of those organizations never got their money back," Brothers said. "A number of funders had to come in and help them get to a place where they could survive."

UMB's still unnamed entity will act as a "fiscal sponsor" to nonprofits. A fiscal sponsor is an umbrella organization for a group of charities that provides them with 501(c)(3) tax status and handles many financial and administrative services. The goal of the UMB incubator is to provide nonprofits with resources and the ability to access funding from large foundations until they are large enough to branch out and become independent, Brothers said. A report from the Open Society Institute argued that a lack of fiscal sponsors can create an administrative burden for new nonprofits that makes it hard to access capital, a problem that got worse when Strong City stopped its sponsorship program.

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Source: Baltimore Business Journal