The Business of Job Creation: An Examination of the Social Enterprise Approach to Workforce Development

Children's well-being, adult poverty, and jobs-of-last-resort

“…23 Other work, such as that of Bloom (2009Bloom ( , 2010 and Hendra et al (2010), which we discussed at more length above, strongly supports the conclusion of weak medium-to-long-run employment gains. A review of three studies on transitional jobs programs by Cooney (2011), meanwhile, does offer some promising findings for the TJ model as it relates to TANF recipients. Cooney reported that subsidized employment programs for disadvantaged populations showed early gains in employment that faded within a year to 18 months, although some subgroups such as those with no work experience and long-term welfare dependency, did experience longer-term impacts with respect to increased employment levels.…”

A social welfare perspective of market‐oriented social enterprises

“…In recent years, a growing number of market‐oriented social enterprises have been formed in the world of social welfare (Cooney, ). Many of these provide employment for marginalised populations, mostly people with disabilities, where the participants are treated as workers, receive a regular salary and enjoy the same benefits as other workers (the social goal).…”

Work Integration Social Enterprises in the United States: Operating at the Nexus of Public Policy, Markets, and Community

“…Given that many WISEs in this second category are existing nonprofit organizations, in some cases turning to commercial activity in search of additional revenue sources, the WISE business ventures frequently take the form of small scale commercial enterprises that are bootstrapping business growth with small amounts of seed monies and limited access to growth capital and run by staff with little previous entrepreneurial experience (Cooney 2010). A key challenge for these WISEs is that the businesses that are easiest to start and that feature relatively low entry barriers in terms of startup costs, infrastructure, and specialized knowledge may be located in the same low-wage labor market sectors out of which the WISE is designed to move beneficiaries (Cooney 2011). Although business enterprises in the low-skill occupations (such as custodial work, retail sales, landscaping, street cleaning, and team assemblers) allow for immediate work placement for disadvantaged workers, who not only may have low levels of human capital, but also may face multiple additional vulnerabilities including long-term homelessness, mental illness, chronic substance abuse, and so forth, they offer low profit margins for WISEs and may be setting up workers for employment in low-skill, low-wage jobs (Bloom 2009).…”

“…WISEs founded during this era predominantly took the form of nonprofit business ventures in retail franchises, restaurants, custodial or landscaping businesses that serve as concurrent sites of revenue generation for the nonprofit and work training opportunities for disenfranchised client communities (Cooney 2011). Examples of this category of WISEs include social enterprises like Greyston Bakery, in Yonkers, NY, founded by Buddhist monks in 1982 to offer employment opportunities to the chronically unemployment residents (now over $10 million in sales), and the Women's Bean Project started in 1989 selling soup to create income opportunities for women shelter residents (now a 1.7 million dollar enterprise).…”

“…Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) in the United States represent a market based approach for workforce development and labor market integration that offer employment and training opportunities as well as bridges to the mainstream labor market (Nyssens 2006, Cooney 2011, Garrow and Hasenfeld 2014, Hockerts 2015. WISEs function as both employers in their own right and workforce development intermediaries that reduce the information asymmetries between potential employees and employers such that mainstream labor market employers may be more likely to hire from a disadvantaged group (Raphael 2014).…”