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.
Dan O'Shea
Kevin Ellingwood
Loretta Blancato
