From a humble plastic folding table, the team behind Fresher Sacramento sells meals cooked in a spare kitchen of the Art Institute of Sacramento.

Right in California’s agricultural heart, innovative nonprofit Green Tech Education and Employment is growing something other than crops – it’s cultivating Sacramento’s next generation of skilled workers.

Now the marketing and communications manager for Sacramento Children’s Home, Houser ended up not too far from his origin in youth development, though you could say he took the long way around.

We are all affected by untreated mental illness, whether we are taxpayers, business owners or a person struggling to help a family member cope.

As a photographer and owner of the Morrison Hotel Gallery with locations in New York, West Hollywood and Maui, Peter Blachley understands how powerful the arts can be. So when he heard about Image Nation, a local photography program to help veterans, he wanted to get involved.

1. Discuss your values and motivations. Explore your family’s motivations behind your giving to better understand what you want to accomplish. By identifying core values, you’ll be able to direct your support to mirror the causes important to you.

A number of the Capital Region’s most prominent family-owned businesses — like the River Cats — have made social responsibility a core tenet of their companies, employing staff and consultants to help make their programs central to who they are and how they operate.

Mariann Eitzman has been in the workforce for several decades now, and her resume is long and varied. Currently the Next Steps Director for Bayside Adventure in Roseville, which is the organization’s newest church campus, she’s in charge of connecting new churchgoers to each other and to the new and continuing programs at the 3,000-attendee congregation.

This story starts back in 1922.

That’s the year when a small group of Sacramento-based doctors combined their professional connections and their Rotary Club memberships to form a program that is now the longest-running Rotary fundraiser in the country.

After staging a cattle drive across the Tower Bridge and a tractor parade down Capitol Mall, Mike Testa and his Visit Sacramento staff faced a huge challenge: How could they broaden the impact of Sacramento’s Farm-to-Fork Month kickoff?

In 2004, four years after launching their first farm, the founders of Soil Born Farms Urban Agriculture and Education Project incorporated their group as a nonprofit to help others see the value of growing food within cities, spreading the philosophy of “healthy food for all.”

Ten years into the movement, and urban farming in the Sacramento region has garnered widespread support. Agrihoods now represent the latest development in the movement — but will they strengthen or overshadow it?

Funders may tell you that restricted funding increases nonprofit transparency, but what exactly are funders so afraid nonprofit leaders will do if given the flexibility and implied trust that comes with unrestricted funding?

If Davida Douglas had one word to describe her ideal Sacramento community, she would choose “equitable.”

Dee Lucien is waiting patiently. She’s on the shortlist for a spot in the prestigious doctoral program at UC Davis’ Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, thanks to a full-ride scholarship she says she never would have known about if it hadn’t been for one local nonprofit.

Comstock’s monthly look at the business news in the Capital Region. So what happened in July (and the tail end of June)?

Those who have seen past California Musical Theatre productions of Beauty and the Beast were in for a treat this year: The “tale as old as time” is decidedly new and improved thanks to a recent influx of grant money from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission.

Katie McCleary and 916 Ink co-founder Michael Spurgeon knew they wanted to start a creative nonprofit for children when they met at a writer’s conference in 2010. They believed Sacramento could support such a program because there was already a strong writing community here, nurtured by programs like the Sacramento Poetry Center, but there was a glaring, missing piece in Sacramento’s creative writing community — a youth program.

In order for spawning Chinook salmon to return to Deer Creek this autumn, they first had to swim against the stream from the San Joaquin River to the Mokelumne River, east of Rio Vista. Then, the determined fish had to make their way up to where the Mokelumne meets the Cosumnes River, and finally, migrate several miles more to get to the shady shores of Deer Creek.