Tag: social impact

This Woman’s Novel Approach to Poverty Relief Is a Game-Changer

Posted on by robbie

It was a 344-page book that set Sherry Riva on the path to launching Compass Working Capital, a nonprofit that provides financial services to struggling families, in 2005. “Assets and the Poor,” by Michael Sherraden, argued that poverty is a problem of wealth, not just income, and its message resonated with Riva, who had already logged a decade working with low-income women and their families.
“If you think income is the problem, then your solutions are income-based,” says the Boston-based entrepreneur. But social safety nets like welfare, food stamps and housing subsidies don’t help families build wealth. In fact, many programs geared toward those with low incomes essentially forbid them to have money in the bank, keeping them from saving, Riva says.
This new way of thinking about poverty became the blueprint for Compass Working Capital. The organization’s mission is to help struggling families build the savings and the skills they need to climb out of poverty. Compass’s programs combine financial education and coaching, with incentives for saving. The asset-based approach works: 60 percent of families in the flagship program have increased their incomes by an average of $11,000 a year, and 81 percent have seen their savings rise to an average of $2,500.
In a country where 62 percent of people count less than $1,000 in savings, that’s an impressive achievement.
Riva has been preparing for this work her whole life. Raised as a Catholic, it wasn’t until she got to college that she started to learn about the rich tradition of social justice work among the faithful. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Riva worked with the philosopher and social critic Cornel West, and read up on the Catholic feminist activist Dorothy Day. Later, she studied American Catholics’ role in welfare reform at Trinity College in Dublin. “My own spiritual journey has been about tapping into the pursuit of social justice as a core part of my faith,” says Riva.
After earning graduate degrees from Trinity and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Riva relocated to Seattle, where she worked in direct-service organizations, including as the director of a women’s shelter.
“It was a really entrepreneurial job, because it was so under-resourced,” she says of running the multisite shelter. “That experience positioned me well, but I had no idea what it would be like to start an organization.” That’s not to say Riva has regrets. “I’ve really enjoyed being an entrepreneur. Sometimes it’s exhausting, but fundamentally it is a creative, problem-solving, gritty, passionate, give-it-your-all kind of endeavor.”
Compass began with a group of 10 families at a charter school in Roxbury, Mass. “We saw early on that families were engaged,” Riva says. The initial results showed not only that the program was helping them achieve important financial goals, but that it also was changing their mindsets.
Today, Compass has the distinction of being the first nonprofit to create an asset-building model, for a federal housing initiative known as the Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program. Public housing mandates that families pay 30 percent of their income toward rent. FSS, meanwhile, allows — and encourages — those in subsidized housing to put any extra money they make into a savings account rather than upping their rent contributions. Compass’s program combines that savings incentive with financial coaching to help families accumulate wealth and assets.
It’s a model that can help families move out of poverty and build savings, which in turn helps them become homeowners and send their kids to college. “The FSS program has provided us with a really big market to do it,” says Riva. Across the U.S., 5 million families live in subsidized housing. Right now, Compass is sharing its model and experience with partners around the country. “Our hope is to help shape policy,” says Riva, who’s currently completing a Social Impact Fellowship with GLG, a membership-based learning platform, to help grow her company’s reach. Through her work with GLG, Riva has focused on plans for national expansion, positioning her organization for growth, and developing data security infrastructure to support key constituencies.

Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, including information on applying.

Riva points to one Compass client as a prime example of that vision in action. Vilmarys Cintron was raising her daughters in the very same public housing complex she’d grown up in. But after graduating from the Compass program, she was able to buy her own home and start a daycare business. “The day that Vilmarys moved out of public housing, we received several calls from other people in her development asking, ‘What’s the program that Vilmarys did, and how can I get in?’” Riva says.
If Riva and Compass succeed in spreading their successful model around the country, there will no doubt be millions more stories like Cintron’s.

______

GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost.

3 Smart, Forward-Thinking Strategies to House the Homeless

Posted on by robbie

 
Solutions to SF’s Homeless Problem Starts with Supportive Housing, San Francisco Chronicle
Ten years ago, the City by the Bay set out to end chronic homelessness by placing people in units where they have access to therapists, job assistance and rehab services. The strategy has proven successful, but to put roofs over the heads of the most deep-rooted street people, can San Francisco take the next step and expand the program?
Could This Silicon Valley Algorithm Pick Which Homeless People Get Housing? Mother Jones
In the tech capital of the world, those without homes live on the same streets that house companies worth billions of dollars. Inspired by nearby geniuses and their computing, Santa Clara County created the Silicon Valley Triage Tool, an algorithm that uses data to identify which of the area’s homeless should be housed the fastest.
Why Businesses Don’t Need to Be Helpless About Homelessness, Inc.
Can business owners create a customer-friendly shopping environment and be sensitive to area residents without homes? Brian Kolb, a principal at Paramount Contractors & Developers, says yes, believing that these six moves by private enterprises can help the homeless get the assistance they so desperately need.
MORE: Ever Wondered What to Say to a Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say and 5 Things Not to Say

These Two Millennials Are Taking on Big Urban Problems — and Winning

Posted on by robbie

As Scott Benner sneakily took a few sheets of blank paper from the public library’s copy machine, he kept an eye out for employees who could bust him for stealing. Walking between the public library’s bookshelves, he recognized several men from the local homeless shelter in Quincy, Mass., where he was living, waiting in line for the bathroom or surfing the web. Slumping in a chair, Benner used a ballpoint pen to doodle, distracting himself from the travails of his life. In the five years prior, Benner had lost everything: his 20-year foreman job at a steel plant, his two-bedroom house. Even his wife left. Kept awake at night in the shelter by men moaning from withdrawal and hacking with sickness, Benner doubted he would ever experience the life he once imagined for himself.
For weeks, Benner kept sketching, giving away his artwork until a shelter worker suggested he sell it. Some brief online research using the library’s wifi led Benner to ArtLifting, an online marketplace like Etsy for homeless and disabled artists. A couple of months later, in May 2014, he sold his first piece. Investing his earnings in a pad of high-quality paper and a set of pens led to even more sales. “It’s selling in ways that I’ve never imagined,” he says. But beyond the cash, “it was just that sense of hope that I was going to get out of the mess that I was in. There was a light at the end of the tunnel now because ArtLifting was there.” Recently, Benner moved into permanent housing.
[ph]
Behind Benner’s success is a little-known group working to maximize ArtLifting’s reach. Tumml, a nonprofit San Francisco incubator, assists for-profit entrepreneurs scale their companies to solve urban problems. For ArtLifting and the 32 other young urban ventures it’s assisting, Tumml attempts to bridge the funding and mentorship gap business founders face by connecting them to investors, city officials, journalists and advisors from Silicon Valley giants like Airbnb and Yelp. On average, participating businesses raise $1.1 million and hire 10 new employees. Collectively, 2.2 million people have used the products and services offered by companies in Tumml’s portfolio.
Tumml co-founders Julie Lein, a one-time political consultant, and Clara Brenner, formerly in real estate development, caught the highly infectious “startup bug” while at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. (“When you are surrounded by talented technologists and entrepreneurs, it makes you want to push yourself to do more and to solve big, hairy challenges,” Brenner explains.) There, they collaborated on a white paper about the challenges entrepreneurs confront. Combining their findings with their love of cities led the business-savvy duo to launch Tumml. “We saw a lot of people talking about these issues, and we want to see more people actually going out there and tackling these challenges,” says Lein.
APPLY: Tumml is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program here.
During its four-month-long program, Tumml provides entrepreneurs with free office space, trainings and lectures and any other support they need to obtain seed funding. “Usually, we are the first outside person for these enterprises,” says Lein. “They are at a critical juncture, and they need help getting their business off the ground.” For ArtLifting specifically, the two women helped the nonprofit network with government personnel, investors and journalists.
 
[ph]
Applicants undergo a rigorous vetting process (Tumml’s acceptance rate rivals Harvard), and at first glance, there’s little commonality among participants. A handful create software platforms that make government work more efficiently: Sprokit helps corrections departments transition former inmates back into society by allowing agencies to share real-time data on a single platform, and Valor Water Analytics assists utilities conserve through meter technology. Several are social enterprises that benefit vulnerable populations: HandUp replaces panhandling by allowing those in need to crowdfund donations on a mobile app; WorkHands is a LinkedIn for tradesmen looking for work. And many simply ease the stress of urban life for city-dwellers: Farmery sells high-quality fresh food grown indoors, and Hitch (recently acquired by Lyft) allows passengers to carpool on ride-sharing apps. What unites the enterprises, however, is the belief that the markets can offer a solution when government or charitable services aren’t enough.
“Maybe two generations ago, if you wanted to solve a problem, you ran for office; maybe a generation ago, you ran a nonprofit or set up a group to lobby on behalf of the issues you care about,” says Brenner, Tumml’s CEO. Today, “the success of the entrepreneur presents a path forward to see a difference in their communities,” she continues. Her colleague Lein explains, “People see the power in taking the bull by the horns in a startup that directly addresses challenges. It’s a really powerful motivator to make the change that you want to see.”
After losing his job in 2009, Scott Benner personally experienced how the business, government and nonprofit sectors weren’t enough. Short-term gigs and unemployment checks couldn’t keep him afloat, and he was forced to enter the shelter system — shocked and enraged — with just a backpack of clothing.
But ArtLifting’s social enterprise seemed to provide a new, self-sustaining way to offer services to the homeless. Thanks to assistance from Tumml, ArtLifting has networked with government personnel and investors and has received media coverage. Benner’s drawings — explosive black-and-white symbols that repeat across the page — now hang in homes across the country. With his bank account replenished, he says his whole world-view has been changed by his interaction with ArtLifting. He wants to see more social enterprises like the ones Tumml fosters: “I would never think of running a business and not giving back anything now. I wasn’t callous and uncaring before, but I just didn’t entertain the idea. Today, it’s why not?” he says.
Currently, four out of five Americans live in urban areas, a figure that only continues to grow. Tumml’s co-founders recognize their importance to improving 21st century living, but Brenner stresses that no one can solve urban problems (homelessness, crime, overstressed infrastructure) on their own. “We need startups dedicated to solving the challenges that come with this massive population shift,” she says. Across the country, ambitious, young entrepreneurs are leading the charge for urban innovation, and Tumml is fueling the groundswell behind them.
Tumml is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated where Benner’s artwork hangs, how Tumml provided assistance to ArtLifting and ArtLifting’s revenue and expenditures. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.

The Newest Way to Solve the Country’s Biggest Problems

Posted on by robbie

What if there was a way to invest in a nonprofit and earn a financial return based on impact? What if donors made performance-based donations that catalyzed investment capital and unlocked impact data? These are just some of the questions that San Francisco resident Lindsay Beck asks herself as she sets up NPX, a company that’s transforming the way impact is financed in the nonprofit sector, along with her cofounder Catarina Schwab. Similar to social impact bonds in that participating ventures would be able to expand much faster than usual, the infusion of private dollars would come from citizens making investments on the exchange. Beck, a Wharton business school grad who founded her own nonprofit for cancer patients, spoke with NationSwell about combining the private and nonprofit sectors.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
What I see in others that I aspire to be most like is presence in a moment. We’ve all been in meetings where someone runs in: they’re late, they’re scattered, they spend 15 minutes telling you how busy they are and then finish by telling you all the things they have to do next. By contrast, I have had meetings and personal experiences where people come in and don’t bring any of that with them. We sit down, conquer whatever the agenda is, and I feel like the center of their universe. To me, that is the most powerful and very hard. It requires behind-the-scenes systems, a mindset and help to get there.

What’s on your nightstand?
I am trying to read three books a month right now, so I currently have “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” by Bryan Stevenson, which I’ve been told is amazing and is teaching me more about recidivism in the U.S. justice system. I also have “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future,” by Steve Case, which is brand-new and everyone’s raving about. And then I have “How to Raise an Adult,” by Julie Lythcott-Haims.  She’s the former Stanford dean who wrote the book about how we’re all ruining our kids and how to fix it.

What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
The movie that had the biggest impact on my life was “You’ve Got Mail.” This might sound funny, but when I saw it, I was recovering from surgery. I was a cancer patient [Beck is a two-time cancer survivor], and I had just been told that chemotherapy would render me sterile. I didn’t know what to do about that. In the movie, one of the characters goes off to freeze her eggs. Literally because of that movie, I started calling every [in vitro fertilization] clinic in the country and found a way to freeze my eggs before I started chemotherapy. It was not necessarily my favorite, but it changed the trajectory of my life and many people’s lives after that.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I am excited about all of the blended finance — some people call it social finance, and it can be grouped with impact investing — that are linking capital with impact. We’re finding new, creative ways to fund and finance solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. Up until recently, the nonprofit sector (or more largely, the impact sector) had been very opaque and inefficient. There’s been a lot of money flowing without knowing what works, what doesn’t and where something’s better. We haven’t applied some of the traditional free-market principles to that sector: there’s not robust information flow or sufficient capital flow tied to impact. That’s changing. With increased transparency and efficiency, I think we can better identify and fund what works and more quickly stop what doesn’t.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I feel like everyone told me it, I just didn’t hear it: it is going to take a long time. Relax, be patient, slow down. Don’t rush it. Being an entrepreneur there’s a sense of urgency, but it’s exhausting, and everything takes twice as long as you think it will. It’s okay to slow down and wait for the world to be ready.

What inspires you?
On a micro level, I want to see this change in the world. I’m really driven not to sit back and hope other people do it, but to play an active role in creating the change I want to see in the world. On the macro level, I am motivated by having a purpose larger than myself and my own little world. In my past job and past career at Fertile Hope, a nonprofit telling cancer patients of the risk to their eggs and providing them options, I had the perfect nexus of passion-driven career that left a positive legacy and I was able to get paid for it. In the Jim Collins Venn diagram, at the center, that is utopia. I had that, and I created that in the nonprofit. Now I’m in the place where I’m trying to re-create that.

What’s your biggest need right now?
Our biggest need at NPX is an innovative philanthropist who’s willing to try something new. Everyone says they are both innovative and willing to try something new, but the reticence to act is surprising sometimes. We need someone who is ready to try and experiment, in terms of how they give. Whether it’s a person or foundation, they need to feel, “I’m tired of the existing playbook, and I’m ready to jump in the ring to try something new. I’m ready to act.”

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
It’s a little bit of a mix between personal and professional: becoming a mother, having my first child, because everyone told me I couldn’t have everything and all I had to overcome to do it. I created the organization in that spirit — to live it and believe it and preach it — but it was another thing to actually realize that dream. It’s an extraordinary day-to-day impact on my life, being a mom, especially after being told that’s not going to happen for you.

What something most people don’t know about you?
Once upon a time, I was a taxi driver. (You’d never know by reading my LinkedIn profile.) On Martha’s Vineyard, I was there for a summer in college, and that was supposedly the most lucrative job on the island. A bunch of my guy friends decided they were going to be cab drivers, and I said, “If you can do it, I can do it.”

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

MORE: The New Way to Govern: Paying for Progress