Greener Pastures Video

Fairhaven Lawn Care was just featured on WBNS-10TV! The story aired in the evening and morning last week and included over 2minutes of coverage. To see the story, please click HERE.

Garden Update

In January I wrote a blog entry on our container garden project – an initiative to grow fresh produce for our pantries, shelters, and community kitchen. The City of Bexley provided a sizable mulch donation, making the garden foundation possible. The local news ran a story, accessible HERE. There are still outstanding material and financial needs for the project, if you feel compelled to help, please call development officer, Terri Rowe at 614.228.5200.

The project is also loosely related to our developing boxed lunch catering business, Freshbox. The business is oriented around fresh, local, and sustainable ingredients. What better way to fulfill that product mission than by growing our own produce on site? When seasonal and efficient, we hope to pick a tomato at 10, slice it by 10:30, and have it in your lunch and out the door by 11 – what a sales pitch!? More to come on that project in the next month.

Fairhaven Lawn Care

With spring in the air, our lawn care business is blossoming (pun intended). The past three weeks have been a whirlwind of bidding new projects, training new staff, securing new equipment, and solidifying our operations.

Some background for new readers – LSSCO created a lawn care business last summer that meaningfully employs clients of our housing programs in Fairfield County. The business ended its first year profitably and we’re forecasting the same (plus some) this season. We consider the employment meaningful based on our embedded training curriculum (see Fourword post).

LSSCO operates multiple senior and affordable housing facilities throughout central Ohio. When Fairhaven Lawn Care was created, we took over the lawn care contracts on 9 of those sites – perfect synergy. This season we have secured several non-LSSCO facilities. Going forward, our growth strategy is to build our business commercially by targeting other large multifamily housing providers that are partial to our mission (i.e. facilities with a religious sponsor, affordable housing developers, etc).

Under the direction of a new Crew Leader (a client employee from the previous season), our lawn care service gets wonderful reviews. So without further ado, the pitch:

Fairhaven Lawn Care is a commercial lawn care provider with competitive pricing, unsurpassed quality service, and a purpose. While exceeding customer expectations, our employees receive the benefit of purposeful life skills training to set the foundation for a more independent life.

There are still plenty of commercial contracts outstanding for the 2009 season, please contact me ASAP if you know of an opportunity we can pursue.

Ignite Video

Yesterday evening the HD videos were posted for the Ignite Columbus 2 event. I also mentioned this event in a previous blog entry titled Reader Rally. What makes Ignite really unique is the speaking format - every speaker has 5 minutes and must spend exactly 15 seconds on 20 Power Point slides. Ignite 2 had over 100 people in attendance and included 15 speakers, myself included. Topics ranged from social media to muppets to social entrepreneurs. I took a light hearted approach to social entrepreneurship, my formal presentation description was A blitzkrieged overview of social entrepreneurship, why people should care, and how they can get involved in Columbus.

(social) Entrepreneurship

Last week, I spoke to an MBA course at Capital University concerning the application of their class’s namesake, Entrepreneurship, to the social enterprise program developing at LSSCO. Our discussion revolved around an important and meaningful element of being an entrepreneur: risk.

Nearly every definition on the web of an entrepreneur includes a statement about risk. However, when you add the word social to your search, as in social entrepreneur, risk is omitted from the definition entirely (see ex 1, ex 2, ex 3). Why!? Just as any entrepreneur, social entrepreneurs accept risk in the pursuit of a return – don’t limit yourself to thinking of return strictly financially.

The Census Bureau cites a staggering 80% failure rate in the first five years for small businesses. Simply put, 80% of small business owners lose many of the inputs that went in to creating their businesses (i.e. money, time, reputation, etc) – that’s the risk. LSSCO is tolerating the same risk in pursuit of building a sustainable form of social service that engages our clients. Beyond earning money to pay for the training programs (financial return), we intend to transform lives and help our homeless clients live more independently (social and financial return).

This is difficult and realistically, failure is an option. No matter how much planning and strategy goes in to creating a business, the market can deliver any number of unforeseen issues. Currently, we are focusing on building strong contingency plans to mitigate our risks and turn any potential “failure” into an opportunity. Establishing these expectations and acknowledging the risk that LSSCO and other social entrepreneurs accepts is essential for the success of these programs.

Moving Fourward

Fear not, the title of this entry is spelled correctly. Fourward, as opposed to forward, is the name of our newly unveiled work training curriculum. However, the name's origin is based closely on the definition of the latter word. Forward is an adjective generally paired with a verb (i.e. moving forward) – often implying a direction or destination. Our social enterprise program is built on helping the homeless advance and move their lives forward with a destination of success and independence. To do so, we have identified four components/goals of our education program (hence the name Fourward):

• Fiscal Literacy - Learning the mechanics of being financially independent, using the banking system, and planning ahead. ECDI is on board to shape a fiscal literacy curriculum specifically to the needs of our client employees (CEs).
• Professionalism - Equipping CEs with an understanding of interviewing techniques, email use, resume building, and professional work culture.
• Job Skill Development - Learning marketable job skills that are valued in the working community. The Columbus Culinary Institute is helping us build the job training program for our social enterprise catering venture.
• Esteem Building - fostering the pride, excitement, and confidence to enjoy a more independent and satisfying life.

The Fourward program is based around embedded real-life experience. Beyond learning about financial skills in a classroom environment, CEs will establish bank accounts, receive paychecks through direct deposit, and will learn the value of saving through a financial match program. To understand interviewing techniques and resume building, CEs will participate in mock and real interviews with community professionals. The Culinary Institute is providing opportunities for CEs to learn hands on job skills for our next venture from the experience of their master chefs. The culmination of these real life opportunities and classroom-like support all focus on building confidence and moving lives Fourward.

Reader Rally!

This past week, I presented on social entrepreneurship at a very unique platform called Ignite. More details and a video of my presentation will be available shortly. After the event, audience members were coming out of the woodwork to discuss social enterprise ventures that they know of throughout the state (and country for that matter). Further, one of our readers, Brian, commented on my previous post about a social enterprise collaborative in Northern Kentucky and Greater Cincinnati.

All of this is great information and a huge help to a research initiative we have underway. We are compiling a report of social entrepreneurial ventures across the state in hopes of developing a platform for the organizations to share resources/best practices. Our list is growing quickly but I know there is more information out there. Please contact me or leave comments with social enterprise ventures you know throughout the state. Thanks for all your help and feedback!