From Milwaukee to Kyiv: Will Allen Offers Insight to Entrepreneurs in Ukraine

Where resources are scarce in the countries where we work, fledgling nonprofits often struggle to make ends meet. With this in mind, ISC launched an initiative in Ukraine that helped 22 nonprofits launch small businesses with a “double bottom line” of turning a profit while meeting their social missions.
 
Although this model is becoming increasingly common in the United States, these social entrepreneurs are the first of their kind in Ukraine. While the income earned can help sustain the non­profit, such enterprises also offer a unique way to give Ukraine’s most disadvantaged people a way up and out. Formerly homeless people, men and women with mental disabilities, and recovering drug and alcohol addicts are getting rarely offered job training, rehabilitation, and critical life skills through these programs. Though the idea seems relatively simple, in practice it can be incredibly challenging to both manage a nonprofit and run a small business.

Enter Will Allen, a former-basketball-star-turned-farmer who launched Growing Power in Milwaukee in 1993. Watching as grocers fled the inner cities leaving behind high-priced convenience stores, he wanted to bring fresh, healthy food to poor, urban communities. “If people can grow safe, healthy and affordable food, if they have access to land and clean water, this is transformative,” says Allen. “I believe we cannot have healthy communities without a healthy food system.”

Today, Growing Power earns half of its income from its business ventures, which include selling rich compost made from worm castings, supplying produce and fish to local restaurants and selling them at farmer’s markets, and conduct­ing workshops and trainings. On the social side, Growing Power trains young people, community members, and schools in horticulture, aquaculture, raising livestock, beekeeping, vermiculture, and other specialties while providing quality food to low-income families. A successful businessman, Allen replaced standard business-speak of the four “P’s of Marketing” (product, price, place, and pro­motion) with his own three: pride in your work, passion over the long term to see it through, and patience to weather peaks and valleys.

Allen’s creativity, vision, and drive earned him an award from the Leadership for a Changing World program, which ISC acquired in 2006 through a merger with the Advocacy Institute. We immediately saw how valuable his experience would be for Ukrainian entrepreneurs just launching their ventures. In July, Allen traveled to Kyiv to meet with our grantees and see their businesses first hand. Some examples include:

• Oselya, which runs one of the first homeless shelters in Ukraine in the city of Lviv. Oselya trains homeless men and women to restore and upholster donated furniture and sell it to the public.
• Strumochok sells promotional products bearing customer logos, such as pens and mugs, to support job training and social integration programs for children with disabilities along with disability awareness campaigns.
• Kastalia offers art as therapy to psychiatric patients, and then sells their paintings, jewelry, and other work at a gallery that invites the public into the once-taboo psychiatric hospital in Kyiv.
• Samaritan Ministries of Ukraine runs one of the only job training and rehabilitation programs in Ukraine for young men recovering from drug addiction. Living in a house near Zhytomyr, they grow their own food and run a welding shop whose products are in high demand from construction companies.
• Return to Life also works with people recovering from addiction by offering on-the-job training in their facility in Znamyanka, which produces paving stones and bricks.

As Allen met with these social entrepreneurs, he offered lessons he learned over the years. For example, keeping the business and social sides of the enterprise separate but under one roof works best, as different skills are required for each. He stressed that entrepreneurs must always fine-tune and build on their model to achieve the change they want to see in their community. In Ukraine, he observed, entrepreneurs that work with populations not readily accepted into society must work hard to communicate what they’re doing and why it’s important.

Above all, Allen said, the point of making money is to achieve positive impact. By watching the bottom line, social entrepreneurs become more efficient, and are therefore able to expand their work. Once they have developed their model and it works well on a small scale, the next step is to “crank it up”—to reach more people with their life-changing programs.