PANEL'S MESSAGE: OFFER A JOB, EXPECT WAY MORE IN RETURN
There is “a vast untapped pool of people” with differing abilities “who are dying to work — and they want to do a good job,” Mark Cronin says in the award-winning 2019 short documentary Sock Guys. “You provide them with that opportunity and we are the winners.”
Mark's youngest son, John, has Down syndrome. Since 2016, the duo has run John's Crazy Socks, a Long Island-based business that employs people with differing abilities. The documentary was screened recently for an audience of more than 250 in Montreal and Toronto at an online event featuring a panel discussion on social enterprises and inclusion.
Montreal panellist Jeffrey Finkelstein, owner of Mile End bakery Hof Kelsten, is known for his community work — for saying yes whenever he is asked to participate in fundraisers. But when the Friendship Circle of Montreal approached him to build a bakery in its space, to provide employment opportunities for individuals with special needs, he was “petrified.”
“I have very little fear in business and life — but this challenge was outside my comfort zone,” he said at the Feb. 16 event, organized by five Montreal- and Toronto-based Jewish community organizations.
And yet “all our employees — they're not scared: They are ready to work. Everyone who contacted me was so excited to try and get involved,” he said. “If they're not scared, how can I be scared?”
Delamie is a collaboration between Hof Kelsten and Friendship Circle that takes the form of a social enterprise: Social enterprises apply an entrepreneurial approach to creating community change.
Participant Nechama Dahan, whose daughter Bracha works at Montreal's JEM Workshop, an adapted enterprise providing packaging services to industry, said of Bracha: “Every morning she has a place to go.
“She goes to a place where she feels that she belongs. She is glad to go — just like every adult with a job.”