The Council on Foundations is making a mistake by pushing a proposal to encourage foundations to give more to socially oriented businesses, writes Kelly Kleiman, a lawyer and fund-raising consultant who writes The Nonprofiteer.

The Council on Foundations wants grant makers to be able to count their support for a certain kind of business — low-profit limited liability companies, dubbed L3Cs — as part of the federally required 5 percent of assets they must give for charitable purposes each year. Such companies earn small profits while conducting a business with a charitable purpose, the council notes on its Web site.

Last year a group of lawyers and nonprofit experts proposed a similar idea in a Worth magazine article.

But Ms. Kleiman, of NFP Consulting, in Chicago, says allowing spending to count toward the payout requirement is not the way to “increase philanthropic capital.”

“If there’s profit, even low profit, then charities aren’t getting as much benefit as they could from program-related investments,” she writes.

Better to require foundations to spend 10 percent of their assets each year on charitable causes — including the for-profit businesses — nstead of the current 5 percent. “That would provide a lot of capital in a hurry, for [program-related activities] or out-and-out grants,” she writes.

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