October 13, 2026
Nonprofit organizations historically struggle with underfunding, scarce resources, and even identifying what physical, human, social, and financial capital they already have. But what if there were an easy way they could share surplus assets with other social enterprises to make better use of their collective resources and increase their community impact?
That question led to the creation of SWAP (Sharing With A Purpose), a marketplace for nonprofit organizations to share surplus resources with one another with the help of a technology platform and advanced algorithms. SWAP is already showing promising results, as detailed in a paper published this week in the journal Operations Research.
Andrew C. Trapp and Jennifer A. Pazour, both Industrial and Systems Engineering professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), co-designed SWAP with collaborators from WPI.
The premise of SWAP is that nonprofits often have surplus resources that fluctuate seasonally, monthly, or even weekly, that they can offer to obtain resources shared from collaborating nonprofits. The authors believe SWAP to be the first sharing system that facilitates resource exchanges whereby organizations can obtain resources by offering their own.
The goal is maximizing collective benefit. “We try to find the exchange that has the maximum total surplus,” Trapp explained. “We found that people don't always have ideas of what they have available to offer," he added.
The Pilot
The study focused on two cohorts of nonprofits in Maryland, where the SWAP team conducted a controlled pilot test of the SWAP Hub software platform and the SWAPcredit trading mechanism, which enables diverse resources to be exchanged (e.g., use of a conference room in exchange for an organization’s staff’s time and expertise to improve an Excel report).
SWAP provides a base for nonprofits to form markets, to offer and bid upon shared resources, and to coordinate multilateral exchange. The design of SWAP was what the project calls “community co-design,” which brings together researchers, nonprofit specialists, and legal aid to help build sustainable connections between participating organizations.
Participating organizations helped shape the platform through its design, feature development, user testing, and refinement. “The technology is only one part of what makes SWAP work,” Pazour said.
Each cohort member has an initial endowment of credits that it can use to bid on resources offered by others in the cohort. An organization does not need to have enough credits in its exchange wallet, as it can also offer assets of its own in the marketplace to obtain needed resources.
Examples of posted resources include tool loans, office space, support staff, grant writing services, training, and computing time.
The research team had three main goals for the pilots: establish markets for resource sharing; provide the logistics to support and optimize exchanges; and to make SWAP work in the real world, with ongoing stakeholder engagement for continuous improvement. They believe they succeeded.
The research team interviewed participants to understand how SWAP supported their operations. “Nonprofit directors report strengthened collaboration, new thought partnerships, and enhanced community ties,” according to the paper. “These results reveal SWAP’s potential to strengthen community impact in the nonprofit sector.”
The inaugural cohort launched in April 2023 in Howard County, Maryland, with four nonprofit organizations serving a range of community needs and later grew to seven members. According to one participant, “We would have never known that [others] could use these whiteboards that we have sitting in our warehouse, or the paint, so it was a really great opportunity.”
The published article covers more than 70 successful resource exchanges among two cohorts. According to Trapp, the program has now facilitated over 80 transactions as it looks to wider implementation.
Origins and Evolution
SWAP actually dates back to 2021, with four Baltimore nonprofits conducting 1:1 resource sharing. “That’s not very efficient,” noted Trapp. The project’s originator, social entrepreneur Mike Mitchell, turned to Trapp, an industrial engineer, to operationalize the idea.
What began as an effort to make resource sharing more efficient grew into a broader collaboration of more than 30 contributors. Trapp and Pazour worked with WPI’s Sarah Stanlick, social scientist, and Yunus Telliel, design anthropologist, who helped co-design SWAP as a community tool. Trapp’s former student, Weixiao Huang, was brought on as lead author of the research paper, with key contributions from students Carlos Moran Figueroa and Arjun Venat, along with economist Alex Teytelboym.
Together, the team developed a technology platform that uses custom algorithms to help identify needs and surplus resources within cohorts. “SWAP is a system intentionally designed to increase collaboration among nonprofit organizations and was designed to amplify nonprofits’ willingness to help, so that collectively they all can do more good," said Pazour.
To scale the innovation, SWAP was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The research team at RPI and WPI have received collaborative awards worth about $2 million from the National Science Foundation, as well as funding from private foundations including the T. Rowe Price Foundation and the France-Merrick Foundation.
Groups find SWAP either from the organization’s website or through word of mouth. They can either join an existing cohort or assemble a new one that follows SWAP’s guidelines. While Trapp has had conversations with nonprofits in other states about forming new SWAP cohorts, additional support is needed to bring the program to more regional and national markets.
“We've created and demonstrated that SWAP works,” Trapp said. The next step is to release SWAP into the world.