Social Purpose Enterprise and The Perfect Storm

As an organization ventures into  a social purpose enterprise, there are a few things that the organization depends on. The foundation for potential success is based on the strength of  the MISSION of the  social enterprise. It must be worthy of support, and well framed in its  commercial enterprise ambitions and it must be engulfed in a commercial and social environment of potential support and success.

The social purpose enterprise that we call The Nezinscot Guild has a powerful MISSION  We provide employment to people with disabilities.  Our employees are  like everyone else in their humanity, but they have some innate challenges in their functionality to be normal and employed.

We have chosen light manufacturing as the framework of our enterprise.  We manufacture quality wood products and we do a variety of repackaging services and all sorts of fulfillment and kitting.  We have had public partnerships to promote our social service MISSION  financially and we have had many strong private partnerships over the years to promote our MISSION commercially.  The stronger these relationships are and their resulting financial support, the stronger is our ability to impact on the lives of our target group, people with a broad range of life altering disabilities.

The Perfect Storm started around 2005 when our state government in Maine started to pull public support toward community service providers.  State bureaucrats adopted a medical model policy(MaineCare).  It became a competition for dollars between the state beauracracy and the private community non-profit sectors,  and unfortunately,  innovative ways to service our needy got lost in the struggle for dollars.  Both sectors share the blame but the state beauracrats controlled the purse strings.

In 2008, the independent commercial enterprise framework at The Nezinscot Guild started to fall apart because of the Great Recession, and again because of state and federal resources cutting .    Our social enterprise, once very promising at being a self-sustaining entity, started to commercially  flounder with the rest of the country’s enterprises because the economy was sinking at a rate never before experienced in modern times.

This was bad, bad enough to drive our social purpose into the ground. But  it got worse.  Our strongest private sector partner, an international pharmaceutical  supplier,  left us.  They left,  as they had entered, based on a sound business decision.  They replaced our quality hand labor with quality automation.  For us it was a huge loss for our MISSION.  For them it made sense to grow their prosperity and business.  We accept and respect good business decisions.  We are, after all, a social purpose ENTERPRISE.

So this was the perfect storm that hit our good ship, “The USS  Social Purpose Enterprise”( The Nezinsot Guild ).  Public support fled, the spectre of a devastating recession squeezed our retail ambitions and our best private sector partner made a business decision that didn’t include our social purpose.  Wounded, dazed,  and scrambled,down and financially hemorrhaging, in a donor fatigued society and a terribly depressed economy, our non-profit, 501 (c) (3) should be dead.

But, good intentions lead to good outcomes, even in the face of the Perfect Storm of  bad circumstances.  The MISSION of a small and dynamic group of very talented people to help their neighbors with disabilities work, despite their  personal obstacles to employment, is a valuable thing.  It’s a MISSION.  It’s for the common good.  It is powerful.

The Nezinscot Guild has a renewed determination.  We have new commercial,  private sector partners.  We hope to re-partner with the new Maine state administration.  We hope to gain a wider following of private citizen supporters who see our MISSION as their own, to support their neighbors with disabilities gain employment success.

Change is Good at Maine DHHS

I heard of the “Purge” at Maine Department of Human Services today.  Some very long-term department heads were fired.  They were held accountable for the current malaise in the mission of the department and the current financial crisis in service delivery

 It was sad and invigorating at the same time. Sad, because I’ve been working in community social services long enough to remember when we were all working together toward the same goals.   The  ”system” was a collaboration of cooperation to make disadvantaged people’s lives better between state and community service providers.  The thought of removing people for political reasons was unheard of.  Back than, you were good, and effective at improving disadvantaged people’s lives or you did something else for a living or were encouraged to do something else by a perceptive and dedicated supervisor.  

The beauracracy has become obese and lost its way.  Too many people stayed in the field for the wrong reasons.  This includes community providers, as well as the state employee side of social services.  It became more about maintenance than development.  It became more about jobs security for the providers than providing services to the people with disadvantages. 

The bottom line is it became a competition for money between the providers and the people in need and the people in need didn’t even have a voice in the discussion.  As time passed, the bureaucrats were the holders of the purse strings and given unsupervised reign of how funds would be spent.   As a result, some community services were frivolously devalued in an effort to cut state financial support. These cuts weren’t  based on the merit of community services and practical reality but rather the cuts were  decided by elitist philosophy .

Well,  the “Purge”  is also invigorating because those who felt dedicated to the services of collaboration of cooperation and were devalued by the those in charge have renewed hope that differences of philosophy can exist and create a hybrid of services that really support people with real disadvantages.

The “Purge” was necessary because the “system” lost its purpose.   It was a bold move by the LePage administration.  I wish them well in this upheaval and hope they don’t lose their purpose in the politics.