Fuel for the Field

Continuing on this year’s theme: positive change: what works…..

During his State of the Union message, President Obama outlined incentives for small businesses to hire more workers, and for investors to provide more capital. But the next day when the President was asked in a Tampa, Florida town hall meeting about job opportunities for one woman’s brother, who had been in prison, he did not mention social enterprise. He did talk about the Second Chance Act – an important federal program that does provide some resources to local communities that can be used to help parolees. But it’s a small program, and unlikely to grow given the limits on domestic spending the President just laid out.

The President added, “If we can find a program that works, that breaks that cycle, it is a good investment for our country.”

It struck me that social enterprises are that ‘good investment’. They are job-creating engines that can be relied upon to hire locally those people who have suffered from unemployment rates three to five times that of other Americans in the best of times. These people – high risk young adults, parolees, people who have been homeless or struggle with addictions or mental illness — are taxpayers when they work; but when they are unemployed cost taxpayers for emergency services and public safety programs.

Nonprofit-run social enterprises earn revenue while creating jobs for the people who are at the bottom of most hiring lists. Once they get that first chance at a job, most move on into the mainstream workforce, reducing homelessness and crime – and the accompanying costs to taxpayers. A triple threat set of benefits – job creation, cost reductions, sustainable nonprofits that solve problems. And they and their employees contribute payroll taxes, along with needed goods and services to the local economy. Investment in this kind of innovation is the kind of good investment the President talked about.

On a practical note, if you want to help, REDF is looking for a great person experienced in business and wanting to spend a year in the social sector to work full time as a Farber Fellow at one of the outstanding social enterprises we support in the San Francisco Bay Area.  If you are one or know one, please check out the job announcement.