The Matpac Wrestling Club, a nonprofit youth program in North Dakota, has increased its revenue 30-fold since 2017. Not through candy-bar sales or bake-offs, but from a multimillion-dollar gambling operation.
It is hardly an outlier. Across the Great Plains state, sports leagues, tourism bureaus and other charities have transformed themselves through gambling.
North Dakota sits at the center of an unlikely experiment: Tax-exempt groups can install Las Vegas-style machines in restaurants, bars and other establishments and watch the money roll in. An increasing number of states now allow them.
Nonprofits have rewritten their fundraising playbooks: They find venues to place “electronic pull-tab machines”—called e-tabs—and often make money faster than they can spend it.
