Browsing by Subject "Social enterprise"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Margin and mission : measuring success in employment social enterprise
(2017-05) Goodrich, Caitlin Marie; King, Christopher T.; Starks, Laura T.; Wong, Patrick, 1956-
Employment social enterprises (ESEs) follow in the long tradition of workforce interventions. ESEs are a subset of social enterprises – organizations that both generate revenue and address a social mission. Employment social enterprises’ missions explicitly include the creation of transitional jobs for those with high barriers to employment, including criminal justice system involvement, refugee status, veteran status, homelessness and mental health challenges. For social enterprises, one of the key management challenges is navigating the tension between “margin” and “mission;” between growing the business and serving the mission. This study examines how ESEs measure and report success against this tension. A mixed methods approach combining coding of publicly available reports from ESEs with ESE leader interviews was used. All of the ESEs were found to be non-profit organizations. Overall, only half of the organizations reported measures of success. Those that did tended to report metrics aligned with workforce development agencies – program completion, job attainment and retention. Of the ESE leaders interviewed, all confirmed that the tension between margin and mission is at the heart of their work. Interestingly, though, not all managed it the same way: one said mission trumps margin, another said margin trumps mission and the rest let the situation at hand guide the prioritization. Analysis of the resulting information uncovered that ESEs work within an ecosystem made up of funders, public sector partners, hiring partners and customers. The report concludes with recommendations for all these players, as well as ESEs themselves.
Nonprofit earned revenue strategies : Refugee Services of Texas case study
(2019-09-17) Lamotte, Jennifer Morgan; Springer, David W.; Streeter, Calvin L.
This report examines nonprofit earned revenue strategies, using local Austin nonprofit Refugee Services of Texas as a case study. Many nonprofits turn to earned income as a strategy to diversify their revenue sources and reduce dependence on grants and donations. Earned revenue offers a source of unrestricted income, or funding that is not contractually tied to a specific program or service. This report examines Refugee Services of Texas’ current efforts to develop an earned revenue strategy and provides recommendations for future earned revenue growth. Analysis and recommendations are based on a review of the literature on nonprofit revenue diversification and earned income, as well as four comparison case studies informed by conversations with local nonprofit leaders
The stories of social entrepreneurship : narrative discourse and social enterprise resource acquisition
(2013-08) Roundy, Philip Thomas; Graebner, Melissa E.
Social entrepreneurship is a phenomenon of increasing economic and cultural importance. A key challenge for social enterprises is resource acquisition. However, how social entrepreneurs acquire the resources needed to grow their ventures is not clear. Moreover, social enterprises differ from traditional ventures in several key ways which suggest that research developed from studying traditional entrepreneurs does not fully apply to social entrepreneurs. The focus of this dissertation is how social entrepreneurs use narratives to gather resources. This topic is examined using a multi-study, inductive, theory-building design based on 121 interviews, observation, and archival data. In Study 1, I interview 75 entrepreneurs, investors, and ancillary participants in the social enterprise sector. In Study 2, I construct case studies of eight technology-focused social ventures. The result is a framework explaining how differences in entrepreneurs' narrative tactics and characteristics are associated with differences in their resource acquisition success. Specifically, from Study 1 I develop a typology of social enterprise narratives, identify three narrative-types (personal, social-good, and business), and show that they possess unique elements. Findings from Study 2 demonstrate that the three narrative-types serve as the building blocks for communication with external stakeholders, particularly investors and the media. I find that successful social entrepreneurs used narratives to engage in two tactics -- tailoring and linking -- and constructed narratives with a unique characteristic: multiplexity. These findings contribute to three literatures that formed the basis of the study -- social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial resource acquisition, and organizational narrative theory -- and have implications for work on competing institutional logics and emotion in stakeholder evaluations.