There’s been some controversy this week about the transparency of the selection process of the Social Innovation Fund. I will hold my thoughts on that for now, except to say that since we received our grant award, we have spent all of our time focused on how to use these precious resources to create as many jobs as possible in California, while developing a model that will enable nonprofits to start and run businesses that give people a chance to work, retain jobs, and advance. The announcement of our planned Request for Qualifications is up on our website, and the RFQ will be out in mid-September. We will be releasing our five year strategy at our annual benefit on September 30 at San Francisco’s Bently Reserve – please join us!
Over the next five years, we will help grow nonprofit social enterprises, and also to innovate in an area where success has been elusive — helping people to retain jobs and advance up the ladder who do start working after a period of chronic disconnection and unemployment.
While we know that social enterprise brings people into the workforce successfully, we do not have a rigorously proven model that has lengthened the duration of employment for people who initially face multiple barriers to work. We do know from research that when people are stably employed for a year or so, most of the important elements of their lives change for the better – income, health, housing, and reductions in recidivism to prison.
Going forward, we will dedicate some of REDF’s resources to advancing those practices that are ‘bright spots’ with demonstrated success in job placement, job retention and upward mobility for social enterprise employees. We’ll build into our “model” what we learn from the evidence.
And while we institute these new approaches, we also recognize that some people will, over the long haul, work at front line jobs that deliver essential services benefitting us as individuals, and improving our communities, but jobs that are not high up the career ladder or income scale.
Many people who are concerned about workforce development tend to focus on advancement, education and training, rather than helping people to simply get any job. This is motivated by an interest in ensuring that people can support themselves with adequate salaries and realize their full potential to contribute. We wholeheartedly agree, and everything REDF and our portfolio companies do aims to help people achieve their highest aspirations for education and work!
But sometimes the drumbeat has an undercurrent of disrespect for people in certain jobs. Like janitors for example. This has always bothered me, perhaps because of some personal history. While my life has been privileged, my father’s father was a janitor on New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1900’s as I was told repeatedly. He was an educated, intelligent person, as many people are who do that work. Maybe that’s one reason why I always resonated with the quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. who manages to support both sides of the equation at once…
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
This hasn’t always been true — but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don’t drop out of school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you’re forced to live in — stay in school.
And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.
If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
While REDF aims to help people set their sights as high as possible, we also might consider how and whether all of us express respect for people that do work on the front lines – and often do it with polish and dignity. Better pay, after all, is often connected to how we value particular kinds of work.
Here is another story you might want to check out if you resonated with that thought.
