Working with individuals who have developmental or other disabilities in Hawaii, the Arc of Hilo strives to improve their quality of life through training, employment, and residential opportunities. Benefiting 230 clients and employing more than 80 people in its Employment Training Service programs, the Arc of Hilo generates 49 percent of its revenue stream from business service contracts and fundraising, up from 25 percent just five years ago, significantly reducing its dependence on government support. Read more about Arc of Hilo...
With revenues exceeding $48 million dollars, Aspen Pointe is the largest nonprofit in Colorado Springs, comprised of 12 organizations that serve more than 30,000 individuals and families each year through employment and career development, education services, and housing programs. The coalition also functions as a social enterprise, offering five business services and enterprises that train and employ disadvantaged residents, at-risk youth, and veterans. Read more about Aspen Pointe...
Chrysalis helps economically disadvantaged and homeless individuals become self-sufficient through employment opportunities. To this end, Chrysalis runs Chrysalis Enterprises, an in-house staffing business that provides street and building maintenance, janitorial, warehouse, front desk and general staffing solutions to over 100 communities and businesses across L.A. County. In 2013, Chrysalis Enterprises provided $2.7 in wages to over 500 of its clients. Read more about Chrysalis...
Clovernook Manufacturing Centers in Cincinnati, Ohio and Memphis, Tennessee, employ more than 140 people who are blind or visually impaired. These employees contribute 75 percent of the total direct labor at the two production facilities. Clovernook's business operations, which annually generate more than $6.7 million in revenue, are categorized into three departments – Braille Printing, Paper Products and Contract Manufacturing. Read more about Clovernook Center for the Blind and Disabled...
Striving to foster a safe and economically vibrant neighborhood, the Coalition for Responsible Community Development was founded in 2005 to improve local planning, development, and community services for low-income residents and small businesses in South Los Angeles. CRCD Enterprises, a social enterprise wing of the organization, was formed in 2010 to act as a job creation engine. Approved by the Better Business Bureau, CRCD Enterprises offers multiple services, including graffiti removal, decorative painting, moving and hauling, maintenance, and power washing and sand blasting. Read more about Coalition for Responsible Community Development...
Esperanza Unida was founded in 1971 to help Milwaukee residents become self-sufficient and bring greater prosperity to the Milwaukee South Side. To do so, the nonprofit group ran training programs in such areas as auto repair and sales, welding, metal fabrication and construction that doubled as businesses, and then used earned revenues to fund its operations. For decades, the organization was a national social enterprise leader, helping over 2,300 people obtain jobs and grossing over $2 million in earned income annually from business operations. Read more about Esperanza Unida...
Since 1992, FareStart in Seattle has provided nutritious meals to those in need while helping the homeless and disadvantaged gain work skills running its social enterprise restaurant. Proceeds from the restaurant cover roughly 40% of the group's budget. FareStart produces over 2,500 meals daily and has helped transformed over 1,500 lives through its 16-week job training and placement program. Nearly half of the students involved in its training program are placed directly into jobs in the food-service industry. Read more about FareStart...
Founded in 1996, this catering and contract foods service venture employs graduates of DC Central Kitchen’s job training program and generates nearly two-thirds of the total $12 million revenue needed to support the nonprofit’s range of programs focused on reducing hunger, training unemployed adults, serving healthy meals, and rebuilding urban food systems. As of 2014, Fresh Start had trained over 1,200 jobless adults for work in the culinary industry, and since 2008, its graduates have averaged a 90 percent job placement rate. Read more about Fresh Start Catering (DC Central Kitchen)...
Founded in 1982, Greyston has grown to employ and provide job training to 55 people, most of whom had previously been chronically unemployed. The bakery currently generates $3.5 million in annual sales. Clients for its brownies, cakes, and baked goods include Ben and Jerry's and many upscale New York specialty stores. Read more about Greyston Bakery...
Founded in 1992 by a Jesuit priest, Father Gregory Boyle, in response to the civil unrest in Los Angeles and as a means of providing employment training for former gang members, Homeboy Industries has since grown to comprise seven businesses. These include a bakery, a silkscreen and embroidery enterprise, a café and catering enterprise, and a diner. All told, the enterprises, generate more than $5 million a year (roughly 25 percent of the nonprofit’s total operating budget) while providing employment to about 240-280 ex-offenders. This social enterprise offers an example of using the model to create jobs for the hard-to-employ, and offers a powerful illustration of how one initial enterprise can lead to a network of related social enterprises.
Housing Works aims to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through advocacy, service provision, and entrepreneurial businesses that sustain its efforts. Since its establishment in 1990, it has housed and/or provided services to over 20,000 people. Its job training and placement program which uses social enterprises including supportive housing apartment rentals, a bookstore and a thrift shop to underwrite the group's programs and help clients achieve self-sufficiency, earned about 40 percent of its revenues (more than $22 million) from its businesses in 2013. Read more about Housing Works...
Founded in 1995, ITN provides door-to-door, on-demand rides for seniors, aiming to preserve senior mobility while avoiding the stigma of vanpool services. The organization charges an average fee of $8 per ride. Seniors may pay cash, have family members or others pay on their behalf, or donate time or cars for ride credit. The group supplements the cash with the labor of volunteer drivers. Earned income provides about 58 percent of revenues, with donated funds covering the balance. In 2005 the group provided 15,250 trips, using four donated cars, and served 600 riders. Read more about Independent Transportation Network...
La Mujer Obrera has worked to transform the conditions of Mexican immigrant women on the U.S.-Mexico border since the organization's founding in 1981. The nonprofit has developed an integrated strategy of community empowerment, part of which involves the operation of social purpose businesses, including an on-line retail store, a restaurant, and a “mercado”-style shopping center. Read more about La Mujer Obrera...
Manchester Bidwell operates a range of programs designed to create empowering educational environments for adults-in-transition as well as urban and at-risk youth. The nonprofit’s educational model includes three core components: 1) youth arts programming; 2) adult career training; and 3) social enterprise. Current social enterprises include MCG Jazz, which preserves, promotes and presents jazz music through live concerts, archival recordings and educational programming; and The Drew Mathieson Center for Horticultural and Agricultural Technology, which trains people in green industries and generates revenue through the sale of orchids and other specialty crops. Founded in 1968, Manchester Bidwell’s annual revenues now exceed $3.3 million, less than $600,000 of which comes from contributions and grants. To help other communities replicate the model, it launched a subsidiary, the National Center for Arts and Technology (NCAT), which now supports eight operational affiliates outside of Pittsburgh.
Based in Prince George's County, Maryland, Melwood has become one of the nation's leading social enterprises, providing custodial and janitorial, landscape and horticultural, facility management, and recycling services to government and private customers. Melwood has grown into a $87 million organization (with earned income contributing 86 percent of its overall budget) that provides job training, employment, housing, and recreation to more than 1,900 people with disabilities. Read more about Melwood...
Over the past five decades, St. Paul-based Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI) has employed a social enterprise model to assist people with disabilities and disadvantages by offering progressive development and job opportunities. Headquartered in the Twin Cities with three additional locations across Minnesota, the nonprofit provides standard and custom packaging solutions, production and fulfillment services, and environmental services for business customers. As of the end of 2015, MDI employed over 650 workers (43 percent of whom were people with disabilities) and had gross revenues of over $45 million (nearly 99 percent coming from business sales). Employees work an average of 30 hours per week, earning $9.88 an hour.
National Industries for the Blind (NIB) enhances the opportunities for economic and personal independence of persons who are blind, primarily through creating, sustaining and improving employment. The group employs almost 5,000 people who are blind per year, pays over 60 million dollars per year in wages and benefits for full- and part-time employees, offers rehabilitative services to about 125,000 children and adults, and delivers millions of dollars worth of products and services to federal, state and commercial markets per year. Read more about National Industries for the Blind...
NativeEnergy is a privately held company, but functions much like a nonprofit social enterprise, since its majority owner is a nonprofit organization, the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy—a council of Great Plains-area tribes in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa. NativeEnergy markets renewable energy credits or “green tags,” giving individuals and organizations a means to purchase “offsets” to compensate for their global warming pollution. Proceeds are used to finance wind turbine or other renewable forms of energy production. Read more about NativeEnergy...
Founded in 1981 to provide social services to at-risk youth, New Door Ventures (formerly Golden Gate Community, Inc.) began its social enterprise operations in 1990 as a means to provide job training and jobs to the at-risk population it serves. The nonprofit currently operates a bike shop (Pedal Revolution) and a print shop (Ashbury Images). During the period between 1998 and 2005, New Doors employed a total of more than 200 at-risk youth and young adults. Its social enterprises raise roughly $4 million or roughly 80 percent of its $5 million budget. Read more about New Door Ventures...
NPower NY began offering services in the spring of 2001 and is the second oldest and the largest affiliate in the NPower Network, a national network of local nonprofits that help other nonprofits use technology to better serve their communities. In addition to training disadvantaged workers to provide computer services to other charities, NPower fulfills a second mission of giving the workers job skills and paid employment through its information technology service social enterprise business. Read more about NPower New York (Manhattan)...
Founded in 1951, PHC operates a number of businesses, including janitorial services, a manufacturing business, and others that employ a total of 1,100 people with disabilities and provide the organization with 96% of its operating budget. Read more about PHC Northwest...
Pioneer Human Services, founded in 1962, employs 700 people in its businesses, most of whom come from its target population of ex-offenders and former drug abusers. Among its business is Pioneer Industries, a metal fabricator business that supplies Boeing. Its annual budget of $55 million is primarily funded through Pioneer's business income. Read more about Pioneer Human Services...
In 1966, a group of parents founded PRIDE Industries in the basement of a church to provide better lives and futures for their own children with disabilities. Today, PRIDE employs a workforce of 3,100 — 2,500 of whom are disabled—generates $95 million in annual revenue, and is the third largest manufacturing and service company in the greater Sacramento region. More than 99% of the nonprofit group's revenue comes from service and product sales. Read more about PRIDE Industries...
Ready, Willing & Able is a central piece of The Doe Fund, a nonprofit founded with the mission to help the homeless lead independent and productive lives. Read more about Ready, Willing & Able ...
Founded in 1984 by a recovering alcoholic, Rebuild Resources owns and operates two social enterprises that provide transitional employment for men and women who want to become sober and self sufficient. One business produces custom apparel (such as event t-shirts); the other does light manufacturing. To date, more than nine hundred men and women have graduated from the program. Rebuild estimates a success rate of sixty-eight percent and a social return of nearly half a million dollars per successful graduate. Read more about Rebuild Resources...
Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange in 1995, Taller San Jose is a social enterprise designed to provide 220 undereducated and unskilled young adults age 18-28 annually with short-term intensive paid training in construction, medical and office careers. Since inception, it has helped more than 4,500 young adults find living-wage employment - of which 80 percent remain employed after one year and 92 percent with a criminal record do not reoffend. Read more about Taller San Jose...
The Transformative Action Institute is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop a new generation of social entrepreneurs and problem-solvers. To do so, it develops innovative activities, exercises, and seminars focused on teaching the skills necessary to foster personal and social transformation. One such tool is its Teacher’s Manual—a curriculum in Social Innovation that has been used by more than 50 universities around the world as well as dozens of community-based organizations. Read more about Transformative Action Institute...
Founded in 1994, Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA) is a substance abuse, residential treatment facility that supports more than 500 recovering individuals on a daily basis. A core part of TROSA’s program is its social enterprises, which provide work-based vocational training to its residents while generating about 70 percent of the nonprofit’s total revenues. TROSA’s social enterprises include a moving company (which has grown into the largest independent mover in the Triangle region), a lawn care maintenance enterprise, a thrift store, and a Christmas tree business.
Founded in 1994, WREN is a nonprofit organization dedicated to better lives and livelihoods for rural women and men. To support their small business support program, the group operates a number of social enterprises including an artisan retail store, an art gallery, an on-line store and a quarterly magazine. These enterprises both help support the nonprofit's operations and, importantly, help to market the goods made by many of the small businesses that the nonprofit supports. Read more about Women's Rural Entrepreneurship Network (WREN)...
Working with individuals who have developmental or other disabilities in Hawaii, the Arc of Hilo strives to improve their quality of life through training, employment, and residential opportunities. Benefiting 230 clients and employing more than 80 people in its Employment Training Service programs, the Arc of Hilo generates 49 percent of its revenue stream from business service contracts and fundraising, up from 25 percent just five years ago, significantly reducing its dependence on government support. Read more about Arc of Hilo...
With revenues exceeding $48 million dollars, Aspen Pointe is the largest nonprofit in Colorado Springs, comprised of 12 organizations that serve more than 30,000 individuals and families each year through employment and career development, education services, and housing programs. The coalition also functions as a social enterprise, offering five business services and enterprises that train and employ disadvantaged residents, at-risk youth, and veterans. Read more about Aspen Pointe...
Chrysalis helps economically disadvantaged and homeless individuals become self-sufficient through employment opportunities. To this end, Chrysalis runs Chrysalis Enterprises, an in-house staffing business that provides street and building maintenance, janitorial, warehouse, front desk and general staffing solutions to over 100 communities and businesses across L.A. County. In 2013, Chrysalis Enterprises provided $2.7 in wages to over 500 of its clients. Read more about Chrysalis...
Clovernook Manufacturing Centers in Cincinnati, Ohio and Memphis, Tennessee, employ more than 140 people who are blind or visually impaired. These employees contribute 75 percent of the total direct labor at the two production facilities. Clovernook's business operations, which annually generate more than $6.7 million in revenue, are categorized into three departments – Braille Printing, Paper Products and Contract Manufacturing. Read more about Clovernook Center for the Blind and Disabled...
Striving to foster a safe and economically vibrant neighborhood, the Coalition for Responsible Community Development was founded in 2005 to improve local planning, development, and community services for low-income residents and small businesses in South Los Angeles. CRCD Enterprises, a social enterprise wing of the organization, was formed in 2010 to act as a job creation engine. Approved by the Better Business Bureau, CRCD Enterprises offers multiple services, including graffiti removal, decorative painting, moving and hauling, maintenance, and power washing and sand blasting. Read more about Coalition for Responsible Community Development...
Esperanza Unida was founded in 1971 to help Milwaukee residents become self-sufficient and bring greater prosperity to the Milwaukee South Side. To do so, the nonprofit group ran training programs in such areas as auto repair and sales, welding, metal fabrication and construction that doubled as businesses, and then used earned revenues to fund its operations. For decades, the organization was a national social enterprise leader, helping over 2,300 people obtain jobs and grossing over $2 million in earned income annually from business operations. Read more about Esperanza Unida...
Since 1992, FareStart in Seattle has provided nutritious meals to those in need while helping the homeless and disadvantaged gain work skills running its social enterprise restaurant. Proceeds from the restaurant cover roughly 40% of the group's budget. FareStart produces over 2,500 meals daily and has helped transformed over 1,500 lives through its 16-week job training and placement program. Nearly half of the students involved in its training program are placed directly into jobs in the food-service industry. Read more about FareStart...
Founded in 1996, this catering and contract foods service venture employs graduates of DC Central Kitchen’s job training program and generates nearly two-thirds of the total $12 million revenue needed to support the nonprofit’s range of programs focused on reducing hunger, training unemployed adults, serving healthy meals, and rebuilding urban food systems. As of 2014, Fresh Start had trained over 1,200 jobless adults for work in the culinary industry, and since 2008, its graduates have averaged a 90 percent job placement rate. Read more about Fresh Start Catering (DC Central Kitchen)...
Founded in 1982, Greyston has grown to employ and provide job training to 55 people, most of whom had previously been chronically unemployed. The bakery currently generates $3.5 million in annual sales. Clients for its brownies, cakes, and baked goods include Ben and Jerry's and many upscale New York specialty stores. Read more about Greyston Bakery...
Founded in 1992 by a Jesuit priest, Father Gregory Boyle, in response to the civil unrest in Los Angeles and as a means of providing employment training for former gang members, Homeboy Industries has since grown to comprise seven businesses. These include a bakery, a silkscreen and embroidery enterprise, a café and catering enterprise, and a diner. All told, the enterprises, generate more than $5 million a year (roughly 25 percent of the nonprofit’s total operating budget) while providing employment to about 240-280 ex-offenders. This social enterprise offers an example of using the model to create jobs for the hard-to-employ, and offers a powerful illustration of how one initial enterprise can lead to a network of related social enterprises.
Housing Works aims to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through advocacy, service provision, and entrepreneurial businesses that sustain its efforts. Since its establishment in 1990, it has housed and/or provided services to over 20,000 people. Its job training and placement program which uses social enterprises including supportive housing apartment rentals, a bookstore and a thrift shop to underwrite the group's programs and help clients achieve self-sufficiency, earned about 40 percent of its revenues (more than $22 million) from its businesses in 2013. Read more about Housing Works...
Founded in 1995, ITN provides door-to-door, on-demand rides for seniors, aiming to preserve senior mobility while avoiding the stigma of vanpool services. The organization charges an average fee of $8 per ride. Seniors may pay cash, have family members or others pay on their behalf, or donate time or cars for ride credit. The group supplements the cash with the labor of volunteer drivers. Earned income provides about 58 percent of revenues, with donated funds covering the balance. In 2005 the group provided 15,250 trips, using four donated cars, and served 600 riders. Read more about Independent Transportation Network...
La Mujer Obrera has worked to transform the conditions of Mexican immigrant women on the U.S.-Mexico border since the organization's founding in 1981. The nonprofit has developed an integrated strategy of community empowerment, part of which involves the operation of social purpose businesses, including an on-line retail store, a restaurant, and a “mercado”-style shopping center. Read more about La Mujer Obrera...
Manchester Bidwell operates a range of programs designed to create empowering educational environments for adults-in-transition as well as urban and at-risk youth. The nonprofit’s educational model includes three core components: 1) youth arts programming; 2) adult career training; and 3) social enterprise. Current social enterprises include MCG Jazz, which preserves, promotes and presents jazz music through live concerts, archival recordings and educational programming; and The Drew Mathieson Center for Horticultural and Agricultural Technology, which trains people in green industries and generates revenue through the sale of orchids and other specialty crops. Founded in 1968, Manchester Bidwell’s annual revenues now exceed $3.3 million, less than $600,000 of which comes from contributions and grants. To help other communities replicate the model, it launched a subsidiary, the National Center for Arts and Technology (NCAT), which now supports eight operational affiliates outside of Pittsburgh.
Based in Prince George's County, Maryland, Melwood has become one of the nation's leading social enterprises, providing custodial and janitorial, landscape and horticultural, facility management, and recycling services to government and private customers. Melwood has grown into a $87 million organization (with earned income contributing 86 percent of its overall budget) that provides job training, employment, housing, and recreation to more than 1,900 people with disabilities. Read more about Melwood...
Over the past five decades, St. Paul-based Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI) has employed a social enterprise model to assist people with disabilities and disadvantages by offering progressive development and job opportunities. Headquartered in the Twin Cities with three additional locations across Minnesota, the nonprofit provides standard and custom packaging solutions, production and fulfillment services, and environmental services for business customers. As of the end of 2015, MDI employed over 650 workers (43 percent of whom were people with disabilities) and had gross revenues of over $45 million (nearly 99 percent coming from business sales). Employees work an average of 30 hours per week, earning $9.88 an hour.
National Industries for the Blind (NIB) enhances the opportunities for economic and personal independence of persons who are blind, primarily through creating, sustaining and improving employment. The group employs almost 5,000 people who are blind per year, pays over 60 million dollars per year in wages and benefits for full- and part-time employees, offers rehabilitative services to about 125,000 children and adults, and delivers millions of dollars worth of products and services to federal, state and commercial markets per year. Read more about National Industries for the Blind...
NativeEnergy is a privately held company, but functions much like a nonprofit social enterprise, since its majority owner is a nonprofit organization, the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy—a council of Great Plains-area tribes in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa. NativeEnergy markets renewable energy credits or “green tags,” giving individuals and organizations a means to purchase “offsets” to compensate for their global warming pollution. Proceeds are used to finance wind turbine or other renewable forms of energy production. Read more about NativeEnergy...
Founded in 1981 to provide social services to at-risk youth, New Door Ventures (formerly Golden Gate Community, Inc.) began its social enterprise operations in 1990 as a means to provide job training and jobs to the at-risk population it serves. The nonprofit currently operates a bike shop (Pedal Revolution) and a print shop (Ashbury Images). During the period between 1998 and 2005, New Doors employed a total of more than 200 at-risk youth and young adults. Its social enterprises raise roughly $4 million or roughly 80 percent of its $5 million budget. Read more about New Door Ventures...
NPower NY began offering services in the spring of 2001 and is the second oldest and the largest affiliate in the NPower Network, a national network of local nonprofits that help other nonprofits use technology to better serve their communities. In addition to training disadvantaged workers to provide computer services to other charities, NPower fulfills a second mission of giving the workers job skills and paid employment through its information technology service social enterprise business. Read more about NPower New York (Manhattan)...
Founded in 1951, PHC operates a number of businesses, including janitorial services, a manufacturing business, and others that employ a total of 1,100 people with disabilities and provide the organization with 96% of its operating budget. Read more about PHC Northwest...
Pioneer Human Services, founded in 1962, employs 700 people in its businesses, most of whom come from its target population of ex-offenders and former drug abusers. Among its business is Pioneer Industries, a metal fabricator business that supplies Boeing. Its annual budget of $55 million is primarily funded through Pioneer's business income. Read more about Pioneer Human Services...
In 1966, a group of parents founded PRIDE Industries in the basement of a church to provide better lives and futures for their own children with disabilities. Today, PRIDE employs a workforce of 3,100 — 2,500 of whom are disabled—generates $95 million in annual revenue, and is the third largest manufacturing and service company in the greater Sacramento region. More than 99% of the nonprofit group's revenue comes from service and product sales. Read more about PRIDE Industries...
Ready, Willing & Able is a central piece of The Doe Fund, a nonprofit founded with the mission to help the homeless lead independent and productive lives. Read more about Ready, Willing & Able ...
Founded in 1984 by a recovering alcoholic, Rebuild Resources owns and operates two social enterprises that provide transitional employment for men and women who want to become sober and self sufficient. One business produces custom apparel (such as event t-shirts); the other does light manufacturing. To date, more than nine hundred men and women have graduated from the program. Rebuild estimates a success rate of sixty-eight percent and a social return of nearly half a million dollars per successful graduate. Read more about Rebuild Resources...
Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange in 1995, Taller San Jose is a social enterprise designed to provide 220 undereducated and unskilled young adults age 18-28 annually with short-term intensive paid training in construction, medical and office careers. Since inception, it has helped more than 4,500 young adults find living-wage employment - of which 80 percent remain employed after one year and 92 percent with a criminal record do not reoffend. Read more about Taller San Jose...
The Transformative Action Institute is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop a new generation of social entrepreneurs and problem-solvers. To do so, it develops innovative activities, exercises, and seminars focused on teaching the skills necessary to foster personal and social transformation. One such tool is its Teacher’s Manual—a curriculum in Social Innovation that has been used by more than 50 universities around the world as well as dozens of community-based organizations. Read more about Transformative Action Institute...
Founded in 1994, Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA) is a substance abuse, residential treatment facility that supports more than 500 recovering individuals on a daily basis. A core part of TROSA’s program is its social enterprises, which provide work-based vocational training to its residents while generating about 70 percent of the nonprofit’s total revenues. TROSA’s social enterprises include a moving company (which has grown into the largest independent mover in the Triangle region), a lawn care maintenance enterprise, a thrift store, and a Christmas tree business.
Founded in 1994, WREN is a nonprofit organization dedicated to better lives and livelihoods for rural women and men. To support their small business support program, the group operates a number of social enterprises including an artisan retail store, an art gallery, an on-line store and a quarterly magazine. These enterprises both help support the nonprofit's operations and, importantly, help to market the goods made by many of the small businesses that the nonprofit supports. Read more about Women's Rural Entrepreneurship Network (WREN)...
