Читать книгу The Mission-Driven Venture - Lane Marc J. - Страница 10

Across the continent, Harvard M.B.A. Vanessa Bartram found herself inspired by University of Michigan economist C.K. Prahalad's argument that for-profit businesses can successfully fight poverty while delivering goods and services to the poor. Bartram's Miami-based WorkSquare, LLC, South Florida's first certified “B Corp,” profitably connects employers with reliable, low-wage temporary or temp-to-perm hospitality workers. WorkSquare keeps its fees low, rejecting the waiting periods and buy-out fees customary in the temp agency world. It even allows employers to hire temp workers permanently at no fee at all. Employers gain a risk-free and economical way to recruit new hires whom they can evaluate on the job before they offer them permanent employment. Low-wage job seekers, often lacking education and English language skills, are put firmly on the path out of poverty and toward permanent employment. What's more, partnering with United Way of Miami, WorkSquare trains its employees for work readiness as well as financial literacy to ensure their long-term financial stability and, ultimately, their financial independence.

Vanessa Bartram's achievements were recognized by the Hitachi Foundation, which in 2012 named her one of the top young entrepreneurs intent on building sustainable businesses in the United States. The workers she's empowered earn more, spend smarter, and build wealth.

Take Hortense, who did a good job when she was a short-term hotel housekeeper, thanks to a WorkSquare opportunity. The organization was able to shift her to another hotel that offered her a permanent opening paying $10.25 per hour. Leveraging her temporary assignment to secure full-time employment positioned Hortense for a brighter, more self-sufficient future.

Social enterprises like Juma Ventures, Homeboy Industries, and WorkSquare, all shining examples of thought leadership, have become mainstream. They disrupt through innovation. They join forces as a community of change-makers. They scale through collaboration. They blur the lines between for-profit and non-profit. They embrace sound business principles. They create business models wherein measurement is integral to the normal course of meeting a challenge. And they abandon the systems that no longer work.