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When thinking about strategies for creating a social venture, its easy to get caught up in the notion that one must come up with an entirely new paradigm or innovation in order to make a difference. This concept is a hurdle that stymies the efforts of many would-be entrepreneurs and is why I think an example of a successful social venture with a simple design can be so illustrative and empowering.
Enter, the Women’s Bean Project, an established social business tackling a complicated problem (chronic poverty and unemployment), with an elegantly simple approach. The Women’s Bean Project began in 1989 in Denver, Colorado with very humble roots: $500 worth of beans and one determined woman. Jossy Eyre then used this ‘seed’ money to hire 2 homeless women in order to make gourmet foods and gifts. The project aims to break the cycle of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness by providing underadvantaged women a place to improve job skills and reenter the workforce. Women who begin in the Project are often unemployed, single mothers who are frequently on public assistance and may lack high school education. Through the Women’s Bean Project, these individuals are taught basic work skills in a gourmet food industry, as well as provided with a platform that facilitates access to services (such as GED preparation), encourages positive self image, and helps place participants in career-track positions.
A distinction that the Project clearly states is that “the Women’s Bean Project does not hire women to make and sell bean products. We make and sell bean products to hire women.” This makes the Women’s Bean Project a great example of a leveraged non-profit organization, taking limited resources and utilizing them to garner additional community support and capitol, all for a socially-minded cause.
Obama’s State of the Union address (transcript) last night was largely a call to action across many sectors of the nation. Although a message of change is hardly new coming from the Administration, some specific plans laid out in Obama’s speech are encouraging to small businesses and budding entrepreneurs. In particular, Obama proposed using ~30B of the returned bank bailout money to establish a fund designed for loans to small businesses in order to increase liquidity in a sector that currently faces trouble obtaining credit from larger banking institutions. Obama also proposed tax credits for small businesses that hire new employees, or raise the wages for existing employees during 2010.
While these plans must first traverse Congress in order to become a reality, some states are cautiously optimistic that these programs could help them recover their economies, particularly in the area of job creation. Indeed, in Michigan, the proposed business incentives, along with Obama’s continued focus on green energy, have given some hope that 2010 may help the state combat it’s unprecedented unemployment rate (currently at ~15% in some estimates).
