When money grows tight in a town like Sacramento, nonprofits must get creative to stay afloat. This is particularly true for the performing arts. But the region’s creative nonprofits have risen to the challenge in recent years, finding innovative means to engage the community and fill both seats and coffers.

Girls on the Run of Greater Sacramento is an afterschool positive youth development program that inspires girls to be joyful, healthy and confident, using a fun, experience-based curriculum that creatively integrates running

When Latino kids grow up not seeing doctors, cops or college professors that look like them, they begin to think that those are not viable career choices: Those are jobs for other people. It is hard to encourage anyone to go into those professions when they don’t know people already in them.

We often only extend care and concern to the domesticated animals that share our homes with us — but Mittens and Rover aren’t the ones in danger here.

It may seem odd that a nonprofit named Rise Up Belize! would be based out of Sacramento, California. But spend some time with founder Joey Garcia, and it’ll all make sense.

Founded by UC Davis students in 1992, and located at Loaves and Fishes in Sacramento, the Mercer Clinic for the Pets of the Homeless serves not only animals, but the people who love them and the community as a whole.

Thanks to the Active 20-30 Club of Greater Sacramento No. 1032, a little crab means a lot of dough for two local charities.

Danielle Whitmore, YoloArts’ executive director, tells a story about a student named Diana. When Diana — a pseudonym — was a student in a local continuation school, she wouldn’t even get out of bed to attend classes.

Bright bursts of yellow flowers amid a sea of rolling green grass are an easy find in April at Mather Field. But just months ago, these dramatic swathes were completely swamped with water, and later this summer their beds will be bone-dry and baking hot.

If the recent history of the Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera has felt like a symphony — with cresting highs, plunging lows and, as was the case last year, overwhelming silence — then this past season reached a long-overdue crescendo.