A new breed of s Social entrepreneur
Hamilton man launches Social Capital Partners to help people with employment barriers connect with businesses
“In the total employment scheme of things, (it was) hardly even a rounding error.”
Bill Young is talking about the 500 jobs he created for people with barriers to employment — street kids, urban First Nations people, battered women and welfare recipients. He had made a difference in 500 lives. Yet his self-assessment was harsh, if realistic.
“It made us ask ourselves the question, how do we change the landscape?”
By the late 1990s, the Hamilton businessman had become wealthy. He had built a computer business and then sold it to GE Capital. An early investment in the tech start-up Red Hat had gone through the roof. At 47, he was set for life.
“Rather than thinking, ‘Why don’t I become a philanthropist in any kind of traditional way?’ I was thinking, ‘I’ve got all this business experience. Why have we separated this world? Why can’t business and doing good be linked in some way, shape or form?’ ”
People in the social justice movement and political progressives have long mistrusted the corporate world. Business practices were part of the problem, the thinking went. When a business did engage in socially responsible conduct, it was dismissed as window dressing.
AS ONE of a new breed of social entrepreneurs, Bill Young saw it differently. If he could find the sweet spot where doing good and commercial self-interest intersected, there was hope of making a real impact in solving social problems.
In 2001, he founded a non-profit called Social Capital Partners in Toronto. Young wasn’t just interested in analyzing social problems. He wanted to create a real-life research and development lab for solving them. Not a think-tank, but a “do-tank.”
Five years into the mission, Young had created four self-sustaining enterprises from scratch. TurnAround Couriers in Toronto, for example, recruits only atrisk youth for its bike courier and back office positions. It operates as a competitive business.
But doing “only one deal a year and then
“We want to show that we can deliver a person who is grateful for this opportunity as opposed to entitled to it for the entry-level jobs.” BILL YOUNG OF SOCIAL CAPITAL PARTNERS
having to take so lon actually profitable wa He wondered, “Cou cookie-cutter way to
He cast his eye on proven business mod franchisees were usu up capital. Why not interest rates? In exch would agree to hire f dates with barriers to social service agencie to be job-ready. The m the interest rate.
Active Green + Ros company, signed on Hamilton. Young se agencies that unders the customer, not ju were trying to emp would supply suitab available ones.
It started small. On ed six community h franchisee signed on stead of doing one d soon doing four deals day the parent comp the pool of the comm
ng to get them to be as hard,” Young says. uld we find a more do this?” n companies with a del — franchises. New ually short on startt lend at favourable hange the franchisee from a pool of candio employment. Local es would train them more hires, the lower s, a car maintenance to a pilot project in lected social service stood “business was ust the person they ploy.” The agencies ble trainees, not just ne franchisee accepthires. Then another n, and another. Indeal a year, SCP was s a month. Then one any asked to tap into munity hires, without the sweetener loans. That surprised Young. The owner of AG+R said, “You found us a labour pool we never would have access to. They’re working out. It’s the right thing to do for the community. Why wouldn’t we do it?”
Young thought, “Yeah, why wouldn’t you do it? Why wouldn’t everybody do this, if someone made it this easy.” And that is the challenge Bill Young is tackling now.
AS THINGS STAND,
there are hundreds of social service agencies in Canada doing essentially the same thing — helping people with barriers to employment become job-ready, then finding them work placements, often by subsidizing employers.
The agencies compete for grants, for clients (the jobless), and for employers who will give them a chance.
Three levels of government also offer employment services. .
It is a chaotic system. And it stymies large employers who want to engage in community hiring. It is so fragmented, they don’t know whom to turn to and give up trying. They resort to placement agencies to do their hiring.
Bill Young wants to build the business case so that placement companies will tap into the pool of people with employment barriers.
“These organizations are seen as the ‘bad guys’ by community service agencies because there are some bad actors, frankly, in the placement business. But the large ones, the Manpowers or the Adeccos or the Randstads have these relationships at very strategic levels of the companies (with jobs). They are playing a very important function that no community service agency can play.
He is pitching to one of those placement firms to participate in a pilot project. “We want to show that we can deliver a person who is grateful for this opportunity as opposed to entitled to it for the entrylevel jobs.” If that works, Young’s thinking goes, community services agencies can concentrate on getting people job-ready and bow out of the placement function.