London Calling

The UK is a world leader in the social enterprise arena, thanks to a thriving charities sector and visionary support from the national government.  With guidance from colleagues at the UK Social Enterprise Coalition and Social Enterprise London, in early December I'll visit Acornhouse, Hoxton Apprentice, Skylight Cafe and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's Fifteen.  These thriving food service ventures provide training and work experience to vulnerable and marginalized Londoners, and offer ethical-buying options and delicious meals to the dining public.

I'm looking forward to checking out the local and organic food products for sale at Borough and Spitalfields Markets. My friend Giulietta turned me on to England Preserves, a local jam maker.

And I'll catch up with leaders working to end homelessness in London, including the director of Anchor House, which is building innovative housing and a new catering company.

New York Ventures

In mid November, I visited with inspiring colleagues at three New York area organizations that have developed a diverse array of thriving social enterprises.

Steven Brown and Bill Mistretta were kind enough to offer me tours of Greyston Foundation's programs and their legendary Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, where local residents make all of the brownies for Ben & Jerry's ice creams.

Like Inspiration Corporation, The Doe Fund and Project Renewal provide job training and both transitional and permanent employment to their participants through their social enterprise ventures.  These opportunities are invaluable for men and women seeking to overcome homelessness, poverty and/or addiction, or a way forward after incarceration. 

Dennis Piervicenti, my old colleague from NYC's Department of Homeless Services, along with Lee Allman and Joanna West took time to tell me stories about the development of The Doe Fund's impressive array of ventures, including their mature Ready, Willing & Able street cleaning enterprise as well as newer back office printing, catering, property management and pest control businesses.

At Project Renewal, one of NYC's oldest and largest organizations addressing homelessness, I paid a return visit to Barbara Hughes, who oversees all of the organization's substantial food service operations.  I met Barbara in her office a few years ago to learn about the development of Comfort Foods, Project Renewal's catering company, which primarily serves the contracted-meals catering needs of nonprofit partner agencies.

Common threads in my conversations were the need for adequate unrestricted reserves and clear business strategy to grow a venture and navigate in challenging conditions.  The tensions between mission and venture have been constants in my talks with social entrepreneurs around the country, and my suspicion is that this tension forces deeper consideration of business decisions resulting in more holisitic and sustainable solutions.

Lessons from the d school

Stanford's design school brings together students from an array of disciplines to address critical social needs with special emphasis on end-user relevance, maximum affordability and rapid deployment. I had the great fortune of spending a couple of days there with my colleagues in the June 2010 Executive Program in Social Entrepreneurship last week.  The d school has developed a process for innovating solutions based on deep, empathic listening and their unique design process; it flows like this:

1. Gain an initial understanding of the problem through research and direct observation
2. Develop a point of view that links the user and the user's need in an inspiring statement
3. Begin to visualize solutions, bringing your POV and all of your data to a design lab environment (posted on walls, etc.): start sketching, writing and shaping
4. Engage in rapid prototyping with handmade models (of products and/or services), which are remarkably effective for engaging people in the work of refining concepts and designs
5. Test your designs with end-users; multiple iterations will yield a stronger product
6. Move quickly to production 

This process can help all of us engaged in designing social services and enterprises to enrich our planning and accelerate the delivery of innovation.  To learn more about the d school's philosophy and remarkable solutions, visit http://dschoolserver.stanford.edu/projects/social_entrepreneur.php

A Few Thoughts on Leadership

Greetings from Boston!  I'm midway through a weeklong exec-ed program on leadership at Harvard Business School; I'm one of 96 participants from 33 countries, all of us in business or nonprofit management.  The faculty (Linda Hill, John Kotter, et al) are masterful, and I'm delighted by the ideas we're discussing.  Here's a top 10 list:

1. Democratize leadership:  the leader's job is to develop leadership in as many people as possible, because the world's in desperate need of them.
2. Great leaders sway hearts, then minds; they lead with authenticity, humility, deep humanity and transparent values.
3. Visionary leaders create vision and strategy; communicate it and gain buy-in; motivate action; create the systems that managers manage; and transform systems when needed for growth, evolution, new opportunities and hazards.
4. Have big, idealistic ideas:  big enough to overcome the world's challenges, and idealistic enough to stir the heart.
5. The need for power can be egocentric or socialized; socialized power is, at core, the need to have impact.
6. Challenges help you identify your learning frontier and grow.
7. Lifelong learning ensures youthful vigor; be open minded, humble, curious and ambitious.
8. Be present in the moment:  change is accelerating exponentially, and new challenges will force you to respond with creativity and innovation.
9. "Do the right thing, don't seek to do all things right." (Jack Welch)
10. Failure is invaluable experience, so take risks; the liability of (too much) success is real.

A Little Perspective from the Summit

Greetings from the 2010 Social Enterprise Summit!  There is a lot of excitement here in San Francisco about the growth of social-purpose business ventures, and great hope that social enterprise has finally achieved critical mass and will soon become a vibrant social movement worldwide.  I'd hoped that the Summit would fill the gaps in my knowledge of the modern history of social enterprise, and a pre-conference session organized by REDF did just that.  From the 1970s on, federal programs including a procurement set-aside for goods and services sold by businesses employing people with developmental disabilities catalyzed the growth of social enterprises in the US.  More recently, necessity has been the mother of invention; here is an excerpt from a paper REDF developed for that session:

"In the 1990's, there was burst of activity among nonprofits interested in employing long-term unemployed people, and/or earning funds to deal with the economic contraction that was reducing government grants.  The Social Enterprise Alliance started up as a trade association.

From REDF's perspective, one of the most important lessons of that time was that earned income strategies work best if they help nonprofits carry our their core mission, not just to generate revenue.  It was extremely challenging for these enterprises just to break even, let alone generate additional revenue for other activities. 

Even in the absense of net revenue, however, social enterprises focused on job creation reduced the cost of programs that would otherwise be covered by philanthropy or government while also delivering creative, effective programs with results -- real wage-paying jobs for people unlikely to get them otherwise.  And they proved to have sustainability and staying power."

To learn more about REDF, visit http://www.redf.org/.

Integrate Vertically to Maximize Mission

A theme has emerged in my meetings with social enterprise leaders in California and Washington: many of their most successful businesses were developed to meet internal needs. Rather than outsourcing food service, medical lab testing, facilities maintenance and other essential services, nonprofits I met with created enterprises to meet internal needs more efficiently – reducing operating costs and building assets. At the same time, they developed new capacity to provide hard-skills job training and generate revenue from the sale of services to other organizations – using a double bottom line strategy (seeking social outcomes and business profits) to more fully achieve their missions.

Prime example:  Pioneer Human Services, established in Seattle in 1963, has developed a wide array of enterprises – including food service, construction, distribution and manufacturing – earning more than $30 million in gross sales annually to support their work with people overcoming the challenges of chemical dependency, mental health issues and criminal histories. To learn more, visit their website at http://pioneerhumanservices.org/products.html

Tasty Network Launches in Seattle

On January 28 & 29, 2010, my colleague Margaret and I joined representatives from 10 other nonprofits from across the United States at FareStart in Seattle to help launch a national network of food service training and social enterprise programs.  These organizations -- from Boise, Chicago, Boston, DC, Ft. Lauderdale, St. Louis, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle and Tacoma -- all provide training to individuals facing barriers to employment (such as homelessness, addiction, incarceration and developmental disabilities), prepare nutritious meals for people in need, and self-generate revenue through social enterprise.  Over the year ahead, we seek to harness our collective experience and capacity to develop and replicate self-sustaining models that combine food service training, job creation, and nutritious and affordable food to address rising unemployment and hunger.

In its press release, FareStart noted that "[t]he summit set a framework for sharing experience and documenting best practices – to the benefit of both organizations that decide to participate in the networked approach, and also those organizations looking to replicate this model in their community. Specific action items and timelines were agreed to in a number of focal areas, including governance, branding, shared resources and membership.  At the conclusion of this first summit, participants enthusiastically signed on to help incubate a collaborative, national network that supports the growth of food service training and social enterprise, providing tangible benefits to its members and populations served and working to increase the collective impact of all involved." 

I'll blog again after this group reconvenes at the 2010 Social Enterprise Summit + World Forum in San Francisco in late April.