A few years ago, job creation was not a major topic of conversation. But, times have really changed. Or have they?

As recently as July, Catherine Rampell reported on the New York Times blog:

In May, the National Journal published a report on economic coverage in the five largest newspapers in the country by print circulation…They did this by searching for the words “unemployment” and “deficit”…. it did show that over the last two years, the number of articles on “unemployment” had fallen while those on the ‘deficit’ had exploded.

Despite the media’s blind eye, with more than 13 million Americans officially unemployed, and millions more discouraged from looking for work, everyone from the “Occupiers” to the “Tea Partiers” agree that America must create a lot more jobs now and into the future if we are to remain the land of opportunity.

Despite the media’s blind eye, with more than 13 million Americans officially unemployed, and millions more discouraged from looking for work, everyone from the Occupiers to the Tea Partiers agree that America must create a lot more jobs now and into the future if we are to remain the land of opportunity.

That mandate has always been at the center of REDF’s work, because the people that are employed by the social enterprises REDF supports had little or no chance of getting a job even in a good economy due to their experiences with homelessness, incarceration, addiction, or mental illness.

Courageous nonprofit leaders, frustrated by the chronic unemployment of people who clearly needed jobs and were ready, willing, and able to work took it upon themselves to create jobs by starting businesses.

As 2011 dawned, those of us working in this arena had an urgent sense of determination to take social enterprise to a much larger scale and create a sustainable model that will reliably create jobs as a pathway into the workforce for hundreds of thousands of people.

Continued distress in the economy exacerbated an already bleak outlook for those facing the greatest barriers to work. But these same dire straits have also opened the door for considering new solutions to problems like chronic unemployment. Solutions like social enterprise that leverage private and public philanthropic investment with earned income while providing not just a job, but the support to help individuals successfully enter the workforce. Solutions like social impact bonds – pay-for-performance – that distribute the risk of investing in new programs away from government and to impact investors.

As we move into 2012, REDF is poised to break new ground for social enterprise in California while demonstrating how social enterprise can contribute to kick starting the American economy. With nine nonprofits in REDF’s portfolio – four in Northern and five in Southern California – and as the chief convener of a national network of social enterprise job creators called SE4Jobs, REDF is innovating in new ways and establishing the kinds of partnerships that will help take social enterprise to scale.

With tremendous gratitude for your support – all of us at REDF wish you happy holidays! Here’s to the work ahead – and more work for everyone – in the new year!

Visit www.redf.org/2011benefit to purchase tickets to our annual Benefit + Social Enterprise Expo in San Francisco on September 30th!

Both public resources and jobs are more scarce and precious than ever. We plan to do all we can with our partners to seize this tremendous opportunity and accelerate the work of job creation and the life changes and hope those jobs represent. We hope you will join us.

We also want to congratulate the other SIF grantees – those that received renewals, and the new organizations funded. Check them out at www.nationalservice.gov/about/programs/innovation_2011_grants.asp.

But given the stubbornly high unemployment rate and the raging debate over federal spending, you might want to add to this summer’s short list a new publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and The Aspen Institute called “Smart Subsidy for Community Development”. This exploration of the history and current use of subsidy in community development shows how public incentives are being used in smart ways to promote investments in lower-income communities and economic opportunity for lower-income individuals and families.

In addition to a wide variety of useful articles included, I was asked to write a piece on, “Public Subsidy as a Catalyst for Private-Sector Solutions: Creating Job Opportunities for People Who Face Barriers to Employment”.

If you have a chance to check it out, please let me know what you think – are there other policies I did not mention that would help job-creating social enterprise scale? Did I miss something important about social enterprise and job creation?

My conclusion:

“Employment social enterprises, with their locally based, business-oriented innovations, have shown considerable promise in helping low-income populations overcome significant and multiple barriers to employment. While scaling these efforts nationally faces considerable challenges, well-crafted public policies and private initiatives that not only provide the right mix of services and supports but also build a sustainable delivery system can lead to more effective outcomes and more efficient uses of subsidies over the long term.

The AbilityOne program can serve as a model for taking employment social enterprises to scale. The Social Innovation Fund grant to support a project that aims to scale social enterprise in California offers an important opportunity to strengthen the data on results while putting thousands more people to work, and bringing together a broader community of practitioners, funders, and evaluators to hone and articulate a widely replicable, sustainable model that delivers results based on evidence-based practice.

If private and public funders seize this opportunity to influence developing programs to focus on performance and measure progress against clear objectives, they can incentivize desired outcomes such as long-term private-sector job retention and educational pathways that lead to advancement on the job. They can also prioritize services for specific populations such as young adults or those who have been incarcerated.

Well-crafted public policies can address the challenges described above to make the employment social enterprises more effective in helping people succeed at work and become tax-paying, contributing members of society, while reducing the taxpayer costs of poverty, incarceration, and homelessness.”

Happy reading!

REDF is one of 11 organizations selected in 2010 as a recipient of the Social Innovation Fund Federal grant. Through an open and competitive process, including an online Request for Qualifications (RFQ) during fall 2010, REDF selected six organizations for our portfolio, announced February 2011.

For the second round RFQ, we are looking for strong organizations committed to building social enterprise to employ low-income California residents facing barriers to employment. For additional information such as eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria, selection process, and documents required to complete the application, please visit our website.

Please help REDF spread the word by forwarding this email to your networks, sharing the news about REDF’s RFQ on Facebook and Twitter, and telling any interested organizations to visit:

www.redf.org/rfq

This week, I learned of a White House initiative to nominate Champions of Change.  I would be hard-pressed to think of a better candidate than Bob Hohler.

Bob was an astonishing instigator of transformative change whose life is worth studying and emulating.  Although he seldom discussed it, he grew up one step away from homelessness in Boston.  Last time I went out for a drink with him, he pointedly noted his abstinence.  Present but unspoken was the family history behind that choice.

With his unique brilliance, personal warmth, and energy, he demanded excellence from everyone around him.  He was a rebel, flinty, and determined.  He improved his community and our country over his entire lifetime until he left us suddenly at age 78.

After marching in the south for civil rights, and helping his friend Henry Hampton produce Eyes on the Prize, he ran for Lieutenant Governor of Vermont.  He played the inside and outside game better than anyone I’ve ever met. You can read more about his life in the Boston Globe.

I met Bob twenty years ago when I started working at the Corporation for Supportive Housing.  His work with the Melville Charitable Trust not only led to pioneering support for CSH, but Bob and the Trust were instrumental in starting, resourcing, and creating the long-term infrastructure for Funders Together, the national funders collaborative focused on homelessness which continues today.

A few months ago, Bob wrote to me: “The stakes are so high and the way ahead so full of IED’s.  Yet we can take giant steps, if we develop a set of sound, shared strategies and focus on implementing them.  The head spins.”

Every time I heard from Bob my head spun and I was inspired to do even more – as were so many of us that had the good fortune to work with him.

In December, 2009, Bob wrote about Atul Gawande’s collection of essays, noting that:

“‘Betterment,’ he (Gawande) says, ‘is a perpetual labor.’ His prescription? You have to work every day for change. You need a diligent attention to detail, a disciplined commitment to doing things thoroughly and well, a refusal to accept failure and a constant search for new solutions.  It sounds simple, but to get better is fiendishly difficult.”

Bob stepped up every day of his life, no matter how fiendishly difficult the challenges.  A true and enduring Champion of Change.

His work celebrates those who, despite working within severe limits and facing huge obstacles, use their ingenuity to craft new, better solutions. He points out that often these solutions are the result of people working together as a team.

With Bob’s passing, our team is diminished.  He impacted so many of us.  But he would expect us to suit up and hit the field every day through thick and thin – like his beloved Boston Red Sox.   And we’ll be there with his playbook at hand, doing our best to live up to his legacy – to be like Bob.

Last year’s Fall RFQ resulted in the selection of the six outstanding organizations that are now part of REDF’s portfolio.  We anticipate adding one to three more groups by the end of 2011!

For details on the 2011 RFQ visit www.redf.org/rfq.

While the costs alone are motivating all ends of the political spectrum to call for prison reform, a recent New York Times editorial makes the case that the human costs have to be part of the equation to make a change of the magnitude required.

And we know that a job, along with a place to live, is at the core of the solution.

There’s a bright spot on the near-term horizon.  After more than two years of cajoling and hard work, the first California replication of the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) social enterprise/transitional jobs model will start up this summer in Oakland.   The City selected Volunteers of America Bay Area, and their subcontractor Rubicon, to implement the model with the full hands-on support of CEO, a member of REDF’s new portfolio.

CEO now employs and serves thousands of parolees each year in New York.  Parolees secure immediate placement on CEO’s work crews, part of their social enterprise delivering maintenance and other services in public buildings and properties; and intensive assistance in landing a next step, private sector job, with a year of carefully crafted support services from CEO to make sure they stay employed.

CEO makes the job itself the new safety net — if a ‘graduate’ loses their job, they can come back on a CEO work crew while they seek a new one.

MDRC – the gold standard of evaluators – has assessed the impact and found decreases in crime and recidivism across the board.

With this kind of track record, in Sacramento and many counties around the State the approach is gaining support, and there is significant interest in replication.  Stay tuned here as CEO’s work grows in the Golden State.

Meanwhile, if you want to make a personal contribution to tilting the playing field toward higher education, attend the “F is for Foster” benefit hosted by the John Burton Foundation at Fort Mason Wednesday May 25.  Food trucks and entertainment by the Bay, with the proceeds going to help former foster and homeless youth get a higher education.  Can’t beat that.  See you there.

Although San Francisco is a big town for fundraisers, in comparison to the big opening night parties, attendance and press coverage just doesn’t match up for events like CHP’s.  Yet they tell the modern day, real world stories of operatic proportions, celebrating the lives of little known, real life heroes who have overcome lives filled with trauma — abuse, homelessness, incarceration; and spotlight the work of the superstars that create housing and jobs for those otherwise frozen out.

Life in the City might be different if they did garner as much attention.  What we celebrate is what we care about.   People in the City’s communities – rich, poor and in the middle – can easily see what matters.

Another rollicking, little-noticed celebration Monday night when REDF portfolio company  Green Streets – a green business providing recycling and janitorial services at McCormack Baron Ragan properties in Hayes Valley, Western Addition and Bernal Heights — held their inspirational launch party at San Francisco Planning + Urban Research (SPUR).  You can check out the photographs here of Green Streets which, under the auspices of Urban Strategies, is operated by and employs young people from the neighborhood – all of them proud, productive, and working.

On the rare occasions that there’s anything in the news about low income communities, and especially about youth, it’s usually a headline about violence.

If we paid more attention to the positive; if the “stars” brought their glitter to Green Streets launch – the people who live in the City’s tougher neighborhoods might believe all the rhetoric about how much we care and expand their hope and sense of possibility.

So next time you have a chance, celebrate the culture of work and the people who are writing a better story for the future with their lives and talent.  Raise a glass to breaking out of the negativity and strife.  These are real stars you want to meet, doing something worth a party.

While you’re cruising for another good party, don’t miss the Volunteer Center awards party on May 11 honoring among others Phil Estes – who we are proud to say is a member of REDF’s Advisory Council — for his service on the Board of the incredible Larkin Street Youth Services.

When you get home from all that celebrating, read about why it’s so important.  Check out this piece from the New York Times about how evidence shows that it’s not as risky as some employers seem to think to hire people with a prison record.

And come to the City Club on May 20 where I’ve been invited to participate in the launch the first ever California Human Development Report — learn about disparities in health and wealth by race and gender in every part of California and what we can do to make a change!

Think about the next ‘opening night’ you want to attend.  Offer your glitter to make a different kind of celebration special the next time.

Spirits at REDF were high as we marked the arrival of Spring with two ‘firsts’ that are described in this newsletter.

Several dozen representatives of REDF’s new portfolio came to San Francisco for their inaugural gathering, where they heard from Paul Carttar, Director of the federal Social Innovation Fund.  He was in town to talk about how REDF’s portfolio is part of a national effort to build evidence of what works when communities deal with tough social problems like chronic unemployment, and how to widely replicate the most promising solutions.

REDF is already starting that replication effort, click here to read more about Samra Haider who is leading our expansion to Los Angeles.

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