By Tess Alonge
Last year, Forbes ranked Boston as the number one city in the U.S. to be a social entrepreneur. Boston is home to several social enterprises, which are organizations using commercial strategies to make a social impact. These companies range from small startups to larger, more established entities. Many of these organizations are highly influential and are making great strides towards their missions of enacting social change. This article will highlight three social enterprises that have been influential in Boston and that Northeastern students have worked with in the past: Year Up, Pine Street Inn (iCater), and Root Cause.
Year Up is a Boston-based vocational training program that has worked with nearly 20,000 young adults since its inception in the year 2000. This organization aims to close the “opportunity divide,” or the gap in educational/professional opportunities for urban young adults. The Year Up program is a one-year intensive training program that provides low income individuals (ages 18-24) with concrete skills development, college course credit, and holistic personal support. Year Up proudly places 100% of qualified participants into corporate internships. Furthermore, 90% of program graduates are employed and/or enrolled in postsecondary education within four months. Year Up believes that all young adults should have the opportunity for professional success regardless of socioeconomic background, and has had a profound effect on individuals in the Boston area and beyond.
Another social enterprise creating social change in the area is the Pine Street Inn, an organization with the mission of ending homelessness. It has been operating for nearly 50 years and reaches nearly 2,000 homeless individuals every day. Pine Street provides a range of services in working towards its mission. These services include: housing, shelter, street outreach, job training, veteran services, recovery services, advocacy, and more. The social enterprise-specific branch of Pine Street is iCater: a Boston-based award-winning catering company. iCater serves as a stream of earned income for the Pine Street Inn. This branch is a catering company that generates financial profit, but also works towards Pine Street’s overarching mission. iCater helps clients develop employable skills that they need to reenter the workforce. Trainees work alongside professional chefs and have the opportunity to learn about food preparation, cafeteria service, and general vocational skills. iCater fosters the development of their clients, earns income for Pine Street, and improves the greater Boston community.
While Pine Street Inn works directly with stakeholders toward its mission, some organizations utilize a more high-level approach. Root Cause is a social enterprise that focuses on using data, evidence, and high performance strategies to improve outcomes and grant-making processes in an efficient way. The organization helps nonprofits to optimize their performance by analyzing other companies in their fields, developing actionable steps to increase success, outlining sustainability metrics, and presenting their value to outside funders. In addition to nonprofits, Root Cause also works with foundations and governments, specifically to help them with investing in impact. This is done through measuring the impact of current/potential grant beneficiaries, building performance measurement systems to help track impact within grant making programs, and more. Comprehensive impact measurement is one of the most important aspects of social enterprise success, and Root Cause demonstrates how powerful data metrics can be in this space.
These three social enterprises are all doing powerful work, but they just demonstrate a small part of the network of organizations working to create social change in and around Boston. The Social Enterprise Institute at Northeastern is the perfect way for students to get involved in the field. However, anyone can get involved with these organizations to work towards social progress in the community.
