Social Entrepreneurship

Over the past few years, more and more nonprofits are launching businesses whose profits support their social missions. ISC has been cultivating this model in countries where resources are scarce, especially for nonprofits. Social enterprise can raise critical funding for the nonprofit while providing employment training and job skills to the people they serve.

We are often struck by the passion and commitment it takes to develop a strong, mission-based nonprofit in a developing or transitional country. With few resources available, and little infrastructure to support them, nonprofit leaders often struggle against tremendous odds to change their communities. Social entrepreneurs must add to this the ability to run a for-profit enterprise with pragmatism and market principles at work. Our goal is to give social entrepreneurs the space to grow their ideas while supporting their passion, commitment, and creativity.

In the former Soviet Union, the nonprofit sector is stepping in to provide social services where the government used to. As a result, many people who were once left to fend for themselves or were shut away in institutions are now being rehabilitated or trained and brought more fully into public life. Social enterprises provide excellent opportunities for job training and learning life skills. ISC is supporting businesses that give people who are homeless, live with HIV/AIDS, struggle with drug addiction, or have disabilities a way to become involved in every day life.

Tangible Results

• Kastalia is a nonprofit that began by introducing art therapy to patients with mental illness, who face profound isolation in Ukraine. Today, eight people with mental disabilities make enough money producing porcelain art objects to buy new kilns, pay staff, and pay themselves—all while increasing production. Now they have opened an art gallery that invites people to come inside a mental institution—formerly one of Kyiv's most forbidden places due to stigma.
• Oselya reaches out to homeless people in Lviv running a mobile kitchen that provides food to 150 homeless people and launching Ukraine's first homeless shelter. Now, a group of formerly homeless artisans live together and collect and restore used and antique furniture that sell out quickly, providing enough funding to cover the cost of their home, food and medicine for the residents, staff salaries, and pocket money for trainees—while supporting Oselya's other services for the homeless.
• A mass of wriggling worms breaks garbage down to compost and provides a natural fertilizer alongside an aquaponic system of fish and plants in Milwaukee. This is Will Allen's Growing Power, which brings affordable, healthy food to urban communities—and sells enough produce to fund half if its budget. With a competitive, cost-effective, and market-oriented business model, Allen is well aware that running a social enterprise means maintaining a double bottom line—one for the business and one for the nonprofit. "It's a number game," he says. An awardee of ISC's Leadership for a Changing World program, Allen recently visited Ukraine to give our social entrepreneurs there advice and coaching on growing their businesses.

From Milwaukee to Kyiv

Will Allen, a former-basketball-star-turned-farmer who founded Milwaukee-based Growing Power, brings his message—about the transformative powers that growing safe, healthy, affordable foods have on creating healthy communities—and lessons learned to Ukraine's fledgling social entrepreneur community.

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Supply-Side Philanthropy: Building on the Impulse to Give

In Ukraine, Macedonia, and Serbia, ISC is working with nonprofits to help them get donations—but we're also working on the supply side, encouraging corporations and individuals to give time, money, and expertise to their favorite causes.

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