I recently met with San Francisco State University Urban Studies Prof. Raquel Rivera-Pinderhughes, who has been working with Van Jones, at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, on development of their Green Jobs Corps program.

The EBC and the Oakland Apollo Alliance recently won $250,000 in seed funding from the Oakland City Council to fund the GJC pilot program. They will convene a Green Business Council later this year to connect Green Jobs Corps participants with area companies working in the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors who would be able to take on interns for 6 months. These interns would then receive support in finding quality jobs with employers with whom EBC/OAA has partnered, union apprenticeship programs, and/or higher education. For at least one year after graduation, the Oakland Green Jobs Corps will continue to provide case management and job retention services.

Green collar jobs are well suited to job training and skills development. They often are highly autonomous, with opportunities for increasing skills, the work is outdoors, in teams, often have a community service component, and offer better wages than retail. Prof. Pinderhughes has helped to develop the Corps training curriculum and is conducting research on local businesses who can realistically anticipate hiring interns. Her research model and curriculum could be used by other social enterprises across the nation that are looking into employment and training opportunities as part of the "green wave" growth of clean tech business opportunities.

She shares many of the same concerns that Van expressed in his "Unbearable Whiteness of Green" article about the majority of new clean tech jobs going to the white eco-elite. Her definition of green collar is: jobs that improve environmental quality which are open to low income candidates who have been locked out of the traditional vocational training programs and may not be job ready or have a GED. In her research she's been finding mostly small for-profit firms with 2-3 staff, and not a great number of job opportunities for trainees. She has looked at employment opportunities in 22 sectors and information on availability of the report, for the City of Berkeley Office of Energy and Sustainability, will be available here later this summer.

One possible leverage point for social enterprise is to develop green collar employment enterprises, similar to Rubicon in the Bay Area, or Cleanslate Chicago, rather than relying exclusively on for-profit firms for employment and training opportunities. But she said that she often hears from for-profit employers that social enterprises do not adequately prepare trainees with the skills to be job-ready. That's where her curriculum will be critical!

What's your experience with starting green tech ventures as part of your social enterprise?

After 35 years in business, the SF-based Delancey Street Foundation, one of the nation's most successful social enterprises for previously incarcerated persons, has made a step into the 21st Century by launching its first web site.

I recently participated in an Institute for Social Renewal training at the DSF national headquarters on San Francisco's Embarcadero, just a home run hit from the SF Giants ball park. The headquarters is home to over 450 residents, who also staff the facility and a dozen social enterprises. All of the staff, including Founder and CEO Mimi Silbert, also live and work at the 370,000 sq.ft. campus, built by the residents in 1991 in what was then a run-down warehouse district. Since that time developers have built up the surrounding area and it's become one of San Francisco's priciest neighborhoods, just walking distance from downtown, with stunning views of the Bay Bridge and East Bay hills.

I attended Day One of the Institute for Social Renewal, one of DSF's entrepreneurial ventures focused on replication and training other social entrepreneurs. I missed out on Day Two--Experiential Component, where I could have worked alongside Delancey Street residents.

Day One covered DSF theory and a tour of the huge Embarcadero facility, including presentations from the resident managers of the Moving Company, Automotive, Construction and Property Management, Restaurant and Catering departments, and the world-class Screening Room.

As I stepped through the DSF gates I was stunned by what I saw and heard. It was like stepping into another world, where all the suppositions and prejudices I had about ex-offenders and prison diversion programs came tumbling down. I felt humbled to be in the presence of men and women who had grown up and lived through incredible adversity and were turning their lives around. The evidence of their pride and accomplishment was visible everywhere, from the freshly painted facades and well-maintained interiors, to the clean and professional presentation of the staff residents.

I won't kid myself, most of the residents had been felons and drug or alcohol abusers at one time in their lives. I sat across the lunch table from a handsome young man who reminded me of Brad Pitt, but for the swastikas, skull bones and a tear drop tattoed on his arms and face. He had spent much of his life in the California penal system and was facing more time for a hate crime he committed, but he opted for the Delancey Street Foundation instead. There was a glimmer of hope and a smile on his face as he spoke about the challenges and construction skills he had mastered in his 18 months at Delancey, and I was happy to shake his massive hand.

The ISR trainees included staff from for-profit and nonprofit prisoner re-entry and employment programs in Oregon, Arizona and Connecticut. The Institute was led by Carol Kizziah, who has been affiliated with Delancey for 30 of its 35 years and was a UC Berkeley classmate of founder, Mimi Silbert. Carol is the only DSF staffperson who is not a resident. Her other tasks include managing the Life Learning Academy a non-residential San Francisco Unified School District charter school, located on Treasure Island in the middle of the Bay. Based on the DSF principles, their motto, Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, is worth remembering: "We are often tossed, but we never sink".

Though I'd been aware of DSF for many years as a Bay Area resident, it took a trip to Atlanta, Georgia to learn about their leadership, as a partner with the Milton Eisenhower Foundation, in replicating their model of a residential educational community for ex-offenders. I had first learned of ISR while attending the 7th Annual Gathering of the Social Enterprise Alliance, and visiting the local Georgia Justice Project, (profiled in SER208), whose staff had participated in an ISR training.

Delancey's program is multi-ethic and co-ed. Residents must commit to a minimum two year stay, but the average is closer to 4. Several of the ISR trainers had been DSF residents for 7 or more years. True to their self-help motto, Delancey has no medical professionals on staff, though several of the residents are attending local universities for graduate degrees.

While Delancey seems to pride itself on not tracking the outcome or achievements of its graduates, they do show how social enterprise can turn our assumptions upside down. California criminal recidivism rates are approaching 70%, while Delancey states that its 16,000+ graduates have a 70% success rate ( only 30% recidivism). In prison, people gain status by what they have or what they can take. At Delancey, residents gain status by what they give and how they help others. To survive prison violence, convicts often belong to gangs, at Delancey Street ex-offenders belong to a family where each one teaches one.

Many of the residents reiterated that DSF ventures are chosen on the basis of their employment and training value, not on their profitability. The high numbers of residents working in the kitchen, auto garage and on maintenance gave the facility more of the feel of a vocational school than a lean business. But I was looking behind the scenes. What the public sees is the beautiful interiors of the Delancey Street Restaurant, catering rooms and cafe, or the hard-working residents moving boxes and Christmas trees on San Francisco's city streets. From a look at the Foundation's 2006 990, their earned income from employment programs is up 5%, to $8.8 million, so their success shows in more ways than one.

I encourage readers to share their experiences with Delancey and other social enterprises that are part of their community's reentry strategy for ex-offenders.

UK-based Catalyst Strategy Advisors CEO Jessica Shortall is blogging about her visit to the social enterprise ventures of the Thailand-based Population and Community Development Association (PDA), winner of the Gates Foundation 2007 Gates Award for Global Health.

Among PDA's ventures are the Cabbages and Condoms Restaurants, in several locations around Thailand, whose slogan reads "Our food is guaranteed not to cause pregnancy". All proceeds from the restaurants are used to fund the social development programs of PDA.

While perusing their site I came upon an amazing PDF, Strategies to Strengthen NGO Capacity in Resource Mobilization through Business Activities, a joint Best Practice Collection published by PDA and UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

It's encouraging to see that the UN and other world health leaders are seeing a strong role for social enterprise in the fight against AIDS.

I've been collaborating with Ron Schultz, a Founding Director of the Center for Social Profit Leadership and Executive Director of the Legacy XXI Institute, on the At Work In The Community Podcast/Radio Programs, some of which are featured on the SERadio section of the SEReporter.com home page.

You can find the MP3 interviews (some by yours truly) with leading Social Entrepreneurs and Social Enterprise leaders on the AWITC site, or, these and even more interviews on the SEPodcasts site (a project of the Scotland-based Kibble Centre):

1. Steve Binder – Homeless Court Program – Ashoka Fellow

2. Jim Fruchterman - Pres. & CEO - Benetech - MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" Award Winner
3. Dave McDonough – Social Enterprise Institute
4. Jill Vialet – Sports 4 Kids – Ashoka Fellow
5. Steve Mariotti – NFTE - The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship
6. Elliott Brown – Springboard Forward – Ashoka Fellow
7. Jerr Boschee - Institute for Social Entrepreneurs
8. Jim Thompson – Positive Coaching Alliance – Ashoka Fellow
9. Sarah Chiles - Satter Program in Social Entrepreneurship at NYU
10. Jane Leu – Upwardly Global – Ashoka Fellow
11. Jennifer Shewmake – Ben & Jerry’s PartnerShops
12. Michael McCollough – Questbridge – Ashoka Fellow
13. Stacey Corriveau and Sid Gould – Fraser Valley Centre for Social Enterprise
14. Aaron Hurst – Taproot Foundation – Ashoka Fellow
15. Cynthia Gair - REDF
16. Allen Bromberger – Perlman and Perlman

The series was produced by Legacy XXI Institute with cooperation from Ashoka: Innovators for the Public and the Social Enterprise Alliance.

The SEEDCO report, The Limits of Social Enterprise, that's been causing quite a stir since it was used as the basis for a Wall St. Journal article, has many findings that are valuable for social entrepreneurs, both for debate and for practice. I think that SEEDCO deserves credit for publishing a case study of their own business failure, the Community Childcare Assistance, and using the analysis to draw out lessons for all of us. Not many, if any, social entrepreneurs are willing to put their own business failures under the glare of such a public microscope and that takes nerve! The question remains as to which of their findings apply to CCA and which can be extrapolated to social enterprises in general.

SEEDCO found a collective tendency within the field to "gloss over the difficulties and limitations of social purpose business". Stating that "it's time for a more balanced vision of social enterprise", the report paints a picture of nonprofits desperate for additional revenue and foundations promoting a "funder's dream, because you won't feel guilty after you stop funding".

nonprofits driven to meet a 'double bottom line' for customers and clients have far more typically led to frustration and failure, drawing attention and resources away from the organization's core work.

Similar to Bradach and Foster's Harvard Business Review article of Feb. 2005, SEEDCO was hard pressed to identify a single example of an entirely self-sustaining nonprofit-based social enterprise, and they see a more sober mood permeating the field overall.

When the double standards of a double-bottom line become a double bind

In their analysis of the Community Childcare Assistance venture, "the major factor in CCA's undoing, [and] probably the most glaring defect in the existing social enterprise paradigm overall," was bringing a social purpose business to market that is bankrolled and evaluated like a nonprofit. The business was under-capitalized and was under pressure to produce social results quickly. Not a recipe for success.

Their lessons from the CCA failure are to focus more on customers and business goals, resist the impulse to "do more", and not venture into new and uncharted markets or niches--stay with a relatively simple model that has worked elsewhere. This is wise counsel, especially for nonprofits just starting out on entrepreneurial ventures. For more tips on choosing ventures, see Jan Cohen's Oct. 2006 SEReporter article, From the Outside In:Market Driven Screening of Potential Earned Income Ventures.

A Mixed-revenue model

The report authors state that:

"far from being put off by its experience with CCA, SEEDCO has embraced the lessons of CCA and incorporated them into its new vision for nonprofit social enterprise--one that has begun to emerge in similar form across the nonprofit community."

This new paradigm includes:

• a mixed-revenue financial model, "SEEDCO no longer suggests that its social ventures will ever be self-sustaining."
• building in significant time for incubation, and
• launching new programs in multiple locations whenever possible.

While improved self-sufficiency, efficiency and quality are certainly key social enterprise goals for most entrepreneurs, no one touts social enterprise, earned income or business practices as a magic bullet .

Virtue Venture consultants Kim Alter and Vincent Dawans warned readers of the allure of profit and promoted this new paradigm of an integrated approach to social enterprise in their March 2006 article in the Social Enterprise Reporter:

The three approaches to social entrepreneurship (funding, leadership and programmatic), alone or in combination, do not go far enough. The true opportunity for social enterprise as an agent of organizational transformation lies in integrating these approaches in a way that builds high performance organizations.

So perhaps we're in agreement after all, that sustainability is not just about earned income or self-sufficiency, but about deepening relationships with our staff, clients, customers, donors and delivering services and products to our communities in more efficient and innovative ways.

The Wall Street Journal's "Giving Back" reporter, Ben Casselman, authored an article on June 1, Why 'Social Enterprise' Rarely Works that sets up a 'straw man' argument against self-sustaining social enterprise. The article, citing a recent SEEDCO report, The Limits of Social Enterprise, that outlines causes for business failure, has drawn a response from the new Social Enterprise Alliance President, Kris Prendergast.

My perspective is similar to that of Jim Schorr, ED at Juma Ventures, who wrote in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that social entrepreneurs need to

"acknowledge that the vast majority of existing social enterprises will never generate sufficient net income on their own, and [need] to develop stable, ongoing funding sources to subsidize the shortfall. When social enterprises are repositioned in this way, the argument can be legitimately made that they are perhaps the world's most effective employment programs for people who lack access to mainstream employment opportunities."

Here's the link to his article from the SEReporter excerpt.

What's your perspective? Have social enterprises gone overboard in espousing or promising self-sustainability from earned income? How has it worked for you? Please leave a comment!

The Apollo Alliance and Urban Habitat have produced a new report, Community Jobs in the Green Economy: Vision for a Green Economy and Equitable Development. The report features descriptions of jobs related to:
o Energy Efficiency
o Green Building
o Solar PV
o Wind Power
o Geothermal Energy
o Biofuels
* Profiles of Workers and Career Pathways
* Policy Guidance for Creating New, High-Quality Jobs
* Examples of Successful Workforce Development Partnership

Last week, the Apollo Alliance took its first-string advocacy team to the Hill to advocate for the Sanders/Solis “green collar” jobs package. Apollo President Jerome Ringo told the House Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, “By focusing on creating clean energy jobs, we can make the new energy future relevant to people’s everyday lives.”

Testimony from Jerome Ringo, Elsa Barboza, Van Jones, and Bob Thelen, before the Congressional Hearing on Economic Impacts of Global Warming: Green Collar Jobs is also available on the Report website.

For examples of other successful green economy entrepreneurs, listen to the interviews with Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx, and Eric Weinheimer of Cleanslate Chicago on the SEblog.

David Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, delivered the opening address this morning at the Annual Conference of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. David provided the big picture, calling on the audience to define a new economy by building local supply chains, increasing local self-reliance and restoring a sense of place.

David challenged the performance of publicly-owned limited-liability corporations, whose charter is granted to serve the public purpose, not the economic purposes of a wealthy few. At a time of growing gaps in economic equality, with 50% of the world population owning 1% of the resources and 2% owning 51%, sustainability and equity are closely linked. David urged us to help move from a suicide to a partnership economy that nurtures healthy communities, with mutual caring as its primary currency, that reallocates resources, invests in social and environmental capital, ends poverty and heals the environment.

Judy Wicks, BALLE cofounder and owner of The White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia spoke about changing the measure of a successful economy from one based on hoarding to one based on sharing and caring, from spreading sustainable business models, not just your brand. Judy has been very active in building the local BALLE network and promoting a local food supply system and food security in the Philly region.

BALLE's "Local First" message has struck a chord with small businesses across the U.S., and has tripled in size in the last year, growing to 52 local networks with 15,000 business members. Local BALLE networks do reach out to nonprofits, primarily as community partners, rather than members.

One of the few nonprofit panelists, speaking on Oakland's Urban Green Revolution, was Ian Kim who works on the Reclaim the Future green job corps project at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. I will soon be posting the audio from this panel as a separate blog entry.

The local first message has always been a strong component of most community-based nonprofits and it seems that small businesses are now teaming up in large numbers to communicate their value to local stakeholders. Another sign of nonprofits and for-profits coming closer together in creating community-based enterprises.

Techsoup/CompuMentor's recent Netsquared conference used a venture capital format, with 21 entrepreneurs, nominated by popular vote, pitching their ventures to attendees at the two-day event held at the ultra-high tech Cisco Systems campus in San Jose, CA. Attendees I spoke with said the focused format was a big improvement over the first conference.

Each entrepreneur gave a short pitch on Economic Sustainability, Social Impact and Tech Innovation followed by a Q&A feedback session. You can read feedback session transcripts and listen to the venture pitches on the Netsquared conference site and blog.

The Economic Sustainability feedback session that I attended highlighted the problems and opportunities of earning income or generating revenue on the web. It's as much about the culture and vision as about fees or donations--charging fees on Freecycle.org?! While it's clear that sites like Freecycle and Miro with high web traffic are highly valued by their users, it struck me that few presented innovative or viable earned income strategies, with most relying on foundation support and the usual Google ads, subscriptions or consulting income.

What's an example of a successful social enterprise with significant earned income from innovative uses of the web? For a consumer or business to business model, take a look at Network for Good. They exemplify successful web-based social enterprises: starting with a blue-chip list of high-tech founding partners, including AOL, Cisco and Yahoo!, with significant philanthropic support (RSF, Case Foundation, Surdna, among others), as well as corporate partners like Google and Microsoft.

Or look at the Big Brothers/Big Sisters Agency Information Management System, another Netsquared innovator, for a great example of how a national nonprofit can use web-based technology to help its chapters get to scale. It was not quite as sexy as the top vote getters, but it had a strong economic sustainability component tied to a clear social impact.

Enterprising Ideas is a project launched by NOW, the current events show on PBS, to examine the evolving field of social entrepreneurship. As part of the project, which includes at least 12 programs on social entrepreneurs, NOW has launched a robust website also called Enterprising Ideas. The website is designed to give regular citizens a window on the world and work of social entrepreneurs. There's a blog, a contest for aspiring social entrepreneurs and profiles of individuals and projects. Come visit!