Why Social Entrepreneurship?

Our experience in working with homeless families has convinced us that social purpose enterprises take just the right approach to reaching the goal of successful, long-term employment for individuals with significant employment barriers. Our past efforts have taught us that many such individuals fail when sent directly into jobs with private businesses that provide little support for marginal employees. Likewise, we have learned that when social service agencies hire their own former clients, copious support may be provided, but many such employees still fail because they are unable to function effectively in an environment in which they daily encounter clients whose traumas mirror their own past experiences.

Social purpose enterprises strike the right balance between these two extremes. They truly are businesses, and they deal in neutral products far divorced from the world of family trauma and dysfunction. But they also provide on-the-job training, with plentiful coaching and supportive services to help trainees learn marketable job skills and unlearn self-destructive work habits. For maximum effectiveness, social purpose enterprises also may continue to work with their trainees after they graduate to jobs in the world of regular employment. VSV, for example, provides job retention counseling for its trainees until they have successfully maintained outside employment for a period of at least one year.

Social entrepreneurship has been used effectively in a broad range of nonprofit settings. Readers interested in learning more about this emerging trend in nonprofit practice may wish to review the website of the Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA).

Likewise, the social purpose enterprise, a form of social entrepreneurship that the SEA defines as “a revenue-generating venture founded by a nonprofit organization for the dual purpose of creating jobs or training opportunities and the contribution of net income back to the nonprofit in support of its charitable mission,” has been used successfully in a number of U.S. cities. Those interested in learning more about the effective use of social purpose enterprises to provides on-the-job training for homeless persons and others with significant employment barriers may wish to review the website of the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund (REDF), which supports a portfolio of such enterprises in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here in the Hampton Roads area, social purpose enterprise has been successfully pursued by organizations such as Eggleston Services, the Sugar Plum Bakery, and Goodwill Industries, which have their roots in the traditional concept of permanent sheltered employment for developmentally and physically disabled clients.