Youth Boatworks: 60-year-old organization changes its ways
The past several years have not been kind to not-for-profits: charitable donations are down 10% across the Canadian charitable sector, leaving organizations scrambling to make up for lost income.
Youth Boatworks, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1950 to deliver sailing and boating lessons to at-risk youth, is taking a creative approach to solving the problem of decreasing donations. Its plan? Teach youth how to build traditional wooden boats, then sell those boats to similar organizations around the world. The youth learn valuable vocational skills, the boats are significantly less expensive that commercially produced boats and Youth Boatworks can fund it’s program.
