The staff at Meals on Wheels in Albuquerque is extra busy these days.

They start preparing 500 daily meals for clients at 5:30 a.m., and now they are often working on a catering job too.

The nonprofit launched the catering operation in 2008 to generate extra income that it uses to support the clients who get free meals daily.

“Some months we have a $200 cushion and some months a $2,000 cushion, but it’s just nice we have a cushion and we’re not in the hole,” said Samantha Blauwkamp, executive director for Meals on Wheels.

Many nonprofits have launched social enterprises like this, and the idea is becoming even more attractive as donations decline and rubber-chicken galas lose their appeal.

Many corporate and foundation funders are not investing in new initiatives, said Jean Block, a consultant with Social Enterprise Ventures in Albuquerque, who works around the country.

“But many are now seeing the value of investing in a nonprofit’s ability to sustain itself,” she said.

The first Social Enterprise World Forum was held last year in Edinburgh. And in the U.S., the Alliance for Social Enterprise in Washington holds an annual summit on the sector.

The Alliance, which launched in 1998, surveyed 1,000 nonprofits within the last year, and about 54 percent reported they were operating at least one social enterprise.

There are hundreds of ways to create an income-generating operation, said Kristin Pendergrast, executive director of the Alliance. But her group draws a distinction between general earned income and true social enterprise.

“Earned income may or may not directly advance the mission of the organization,” she said. “A church that sells potted plants—that’s earned income.”

But if a nonprofit figures out a way to incorporate a market-based strategy to advance its mission, that’s social enterprise, Pendergrast said.

For example, Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, hires employees with little or no work experience with backgrounds that include incarceration and homelessness. It trains them, and the revenues from the bakery support the Greyston Foundation, which funds a variety of social services in its community.