Social Enterprise

Sarah Heinz House

Founded as a settlement house in 1913, Sarah Heinz House is the largest independent Boys & Girls Club in the country with an annual budget of $2 million, 14 percent of which is earned income. The group recently expanded its facilities and plans to offset increased operating expenses with additional earned income. The first priority is the café. Read more about Sarah Heinz House...

Ambiance Boutique

Ambiance Boutique is a high-end women's consignment store with 2 Pittsburgh locations that is 100-percent owned by the nonprofit Bethlehem Haven, a group that provides emergency shelter, transitional housing, medical support, and employment services (Project Employ) to Pittsburgh-area women. Earned income from the stores make up about 22 percent of Bethlehem Haven’s total $3.6 million in annual revenue.

Resources for Human Development

Founded in 1970, Resources for Human Development serves people who are homeless, mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and drug addicted. The group, which has a budget of $165 million and operates in 11 states, increasingly engages in social enterprise to raise revenue and meet service needs. Read more about Resources for Human Development...

Women's Rural Entrepreneurship Network (WREN)

Founded in 1994, WREN is a nonprofit organization dedicated to better lives and livelihoods for rural women and men. To support their small business support program, the group operates a number of social enterprises including an artisan retail store, an art gallery, an on-line store and a quarterly magazine. These enterprises both help support the nonprofit's operations and, importantly, help to market the goods made by many of the small businesses that the nonprofit supports. Read more about Women's Rural Entrepreneurship Network (WREN)...

Taller San Jose

Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange in 1995, Taller San Jose is a social enterprise designed to provide 220 undereducated and unskilled young adults age 18-28 annually with short-term intensive paid training in construction, medical and office careers. Since inception, it has helped more than 4,500 young adults find living-wage employment - of which 80 percent remain employed after one year and 92 percent with a criminal record do not reoffend. Read more about Taller San Jose...

Rebuild Resources

Founded in 1984 by a recovering alcoholic, Rebuild Resources owns and operates two social enterprises that provide transitional employment for men and women who want to become sober and self sufficient. One business produces custom apparel (such as event t-shirts); the other does light manufacturing. To date, more than nine hundred men and women have graduated from the program. Rebuild estimates a success rate of sixty-eight percent and a social return of nearly half a million dollars per successful graduate. Read more about Rebuild Resources...

PRIDE Industries

In 1966, a group of parents founded PRIDE Industries in the basement of a church to provide better lives and futures for their own children with disabilities. Today, PRIDE employs a workforce of 3,100 — 2,500 of whom are disabled—generates $95 million in annual revenue, and is the third largest manufacturing and service company in the greater Sacramento region. More than 99% of the nonprofit group's revenue comes from service and product sales. Read more about PRIDE Industries...

PHC Northwest

Founded in 1951, PHC operates a number of businesses, including janitorial services, a manufacturing business, and others that employ a total of 1,100 people with disabilities and provide the organization with 96% of its operating budget. Read more about PHC Northwest...

Pioneer Human Services

Pioneer Human Services, founded in 1962, employs 700 people in its businesses, most of whom come from its target population of ex-offenders and former drug abusers. Among its business is Pioneer Industries, a metal fabricator business that supplies Boeing. Its annual budget of $55 million is primarily funded through Pioneer's business income. Read more about Pioneer Human Services...

New Door Ventures

Founded in 1981 to provide social services to at-risk youth, New Door Ventures (formerly Golden Gate Community, Inc.) began its social enterprise operations in 1990 as a means to provide job training and jobs to the at-risk population it serves. The nonprofit currently operates a bike shop (Pedal Revolution) and a print shop (Ashbury Images). During the period between 1998 and 2005, New Doors employed a total of more than 200 at-risk youth and young adults. Its social enterprises raise roughly $4 million or roughly 80 percent of its $5 million budget. Read more about New Door Ventures...

NativeEnergy

NativeEnergy is a privately held company, but functions much like a nonprofit social enterprise, since its majority owner is a nonprofit organization, the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy—a council of Great Plains-area tribes in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa. NativeEnergy markets renewable energy credits or “green tags,” giving individuals and organizations a means to purchase “offsets” to compensate for their global warming pollution. Proceeds are used to finance wind turbine or other renewable forms of energy production. Read more about NativeEnergy...

National Industries for the Blind

National Industries for the Blind (NIB) enhances the opportunities for economic and personal independence of persons who are blind, primarily through creating, sustaining and improving employment. The group employs almost 5,000 people who are blind per year, pays over 60 million dollars per year in wages and benefits for full- and part-time employees, offers rehabilitative services to about 125,000 children and adults, and delivers millions of dollars worth of products and services to federal, state and commercial markets per year. Read more about National Industries for the Blind...

Melwood

Based in Prince George's County, Maryland, Melwood has become one of the nation's leading social enterprises, providing custodial and janitorial, landscape and horticultural, facility management, and recycling services to government and private customers.  Melwood has grown into a $87 million organization (with earned income contributing 86 percent of its overall budget) that provides job training, employment, housing, and recreation to more than 1,900 people with disabilities. Read more about Melwood...

Manchester Bidwell

Manchester Bidwell operates a range of programs designed to create empowering educational environments for adults-in-transition as well as urban and at-risk youth.  The nonprofit’s educational model includes three core components:  1) youth arts programming; 2) adult career training; and 3) social enterprise.  Current social enterprises include MCG Jazz, which preserves, promotes and presents jazz music through live concerts, archival recordings and educational programming; and The Drew Mathieson Center for Horticultural and Agricultural Technology, which trains people in green industries and generates revenue through the sale of orchids and other specialty crops.  Founded in 1968, Manchester Bidwell’s annual revenues now exceed $3.3 million, less than $600,000 of which comes from contributions and grants.  To help other communities replicate the model, it launched a subsidiary, the National Center for Arts and Technology (NCAT), which now supports eight operational affiliates outside of Pittsburgh.

La Mujer Obrera

La Mujer Obrera has worked to transform the conditions of Mexican immigrant women on the U.S.-Mexico border since the organization's founding in 1981. The nonprofit has developed an integrated strategy of community empowerment, part of which involves the operation of social purpose businesses, including an on-line retail store, a restaurant, and a “mercado”-style shopping center. Read more about La Mujer Obrera...

Independent Transportation Network

Founded in 1995, ITN provides door-to-door, on-demand rides for seniors, aiming to preserve senior mobility while avoiding the stigma of vanpool services. The organization charges an average fee of $8 per ride. Seniors may pay cash, have family members or others pay on their behalf, or donate time or cars for ride credit. The group supplements the cash with the labor of volunteer drivers. Earned income provides about 58 percent of revenues, with donated funds covering the balance. In 2005 the group provided 15,250 trips, using four donated cars, and served 600 riders. Read more about Independent Transportation Network...

Homeboy Industries

Founded in 1992 by a Jesuit priest, Father Gregory Boyle, in response to the civil unrest in Los Angeles and as a means of providing employment training for former gang members, Homeboy Industries has since grown to comprise seven businesses. These include a bakery, a silkscreen and embroidery enterprise, a café and catering enterprise, and a diner. All told, the enterprises, generate more than $5 million a year (roughly 25 percent of the nonprofit’s total operating budget) while providing employment to about 240-280 ex-offenders. This social enterprise offers an example of using the model to create jobs for the hard-to-employ, and offers a powerful illustration of how one initial enterprise can lead to a network of related social enterprises.

Greyston Bakery

Founded in 1982, Greyston has grown to employ and provide job training to 55 people, most of whom had previously been chronically unemployed. The bakery currently generates $3.5 million in annual sales. Clients for its brownies, cakes, and baked goods include Ben and Jerry's and many upscale New York specialty stores. Read more about Greyston Bakery...

Fresh Start Catering (DC Central Kitchen)

Founded in 1996, this catering and contract foods service venture employs graduates of DC Central Kitchen’s job training program and generates nearly two-thirds of the total $12 million revenue needed to support the nonprofit’s range of programs focused on reducing hunger, training unemployed adults, serving healthy meals, and rebuilding urban food systems. As of 2014, Fresh Start had trained over 1,200 jobless adults for work in the culinary industry, and since 2008, its graduates have averaged a 90 percent job placement rate. Read more about Fresh Start Catering (DC Central Kitchen)...