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
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