On Oct. 7, local investment firm Notley Ventures and the Austin-based nonprofit I Live Here I Give Here are presenting The Bolder Board Training, a workshop led by TED Talk-alumni Dan Pallotta. The event is geared toward nonprofit board members, executive directors, advisory members and key staff and will teach them how to cultivate sustainable and scalable business models within the nonprofit sector.

The host committee for the event includes chair Monica Peraza, president and co-founder of the Austin-based Hispanic Alliance, as well as Notley and BuildASign founder Dan Graham, among others.

Pallotta’s TED Talk—”The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong”—has been viewed by more than 4 million people. In it, he discusses the double standards applied to nonprofits and charities that prevent them from maximizing growth in the same ways that are available to private companies.

Dan Graham, co-founder of Notley Ventures, is one of the event’s organizers. He has years of experience in both the private and nonprofit sectors and believes that nonprofits can benefit from more entrepreneurial strategies that prioritize impact rather than minimizing overhead costs.

“The company that I founded originally about 12 years ago was called BuildASign, and we developed while I was there a really robust philanthropic program that was very entrepreneurial in nature,” Graham said.

His experience at BuildASign, a custom printing company, convinced him that philanthropic ventures would be better served by more conventionally capitalist strategies that incentivize risk and increase impact.

This idea, however, is not always a popular one.

“Even talking to nonprofits in Austin about this event, Dan Pallotta is a little bit of a controversial figure,” Graham said.

“Just like any organization, nonprofits are built to maximize their chances of getting funding, and historically funders have used certain metrics that encourage low overhead to decide where their grant dollars are going to go,” he continued. “As a result, the nonprofit community has grown up thinking a certain way about what an appropriate level of expenditure is, what an appropriate amount of salary to pay is, and it’s all been geared toward the funding community.”

Like Pallotta, Graham seeks to disrupt this type of thinking.

In 2015, he founded Notley Ventures. The investment firm buys equity in for-profit companies as well as provides funding for innovative nonprofits.

“We try to both educate and put our money out there as another source of capital that—instead of encouraging a sort of faux efficiency—encourages maximizing impact,” Graham said. “Instead of calling out what percent of the donation flows all the way through the organization and having that be a metric [of legitimacy], we look at how many kids are you saving? How many people are you feeding? If you have a really inefficient, from a cost-perspective, operational organization, but you’re feeding ten times as many people, that’s better than having a really efficient organization that only feeds one person.”

The Bolder Board Training is designed to get more people in Austin’s philanthropic community to think in this way. Because board members control the funding of nonprofit organizations, Graham and Pallotta decided to focus on them.

“I think it’s going to challenge a lot of the financial models that most nonprofits use,” Graham said. “So coming in with an open mind and being willing to brainstorm and put ideas down on paper [will be important]. We really just want to start a conversation.”

Tickets for the event—which will be held at Brazos Hall, 204 E. Fourth St., Austin, from 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m.—are $150 and can be purchased here.