Success Stories
A Social Innovation Success Story
Social Capital Partners
Bill Young, Founder, Social Capital Partners.
Social Capital Partners (SCP) is a firm that invests in start-ups – but unlike other such firms, SCP invests in start–ups with a double bottom line. It looks for returns not only in revenue, but in social impact as well.
Founded by Bill Young a decade ago, SCP is paving the way for social enterprise.
Young started SCP as a way to use his business skills and good fortune to give back to society.
“We, as a society, need to find more sustainable ways to solve social challenges. SCP does this by providing employment for people with employment barriers,” says Young.
SCP initially financed businesses that employed people having a hard time finding a job, such as single parents and people with disabilities.
It financed all types of businesses – a property management company in British Columbia, an inner-city renovation company in Winnipeg and a bicycle courier company in Toronto, to list a few – all of which employ people through community employment agencies geared towards people who have employment barriers.
“All the companies we funded are profitable. With our help, these companies together are employing about 400 people, which is great, but we want to do more. We want to change the landscape,” says Young.
Five years ago, SCP began phase two.
SCP began offering financing for expanding franchises. The company would go into a region and connect with community employment agencies. It would then look for franchisees interested in expanding and offer them financing at a very reasonable interest rate, but with a catch.
“To get the money, they’d have to hire a certain number of employees at the new franchise through these agencies. We even looked through the agencies, assessed applicants and provided the franchisee with a job ready pool of applicants,” says Young.
And even better, the franchise’s interest rate would decrease with the number of agency employees they hired, a win–win situation for everybody.
SCP made this franchise deal with Active Green + Ross and started a pilot project in Hamilton where they hired six people who had employment barriers. The company had only great things to say about the new employees and considered it a success.
Now Active Green + Ross has up to 25 franchise locations through SCP’s financing.
“The franchise model worked great and we have a few more deals that are in the works with other franchise networks,” says Young.
But even with this new success, Young wants more.
SCP recently began phase three of its social innovation revolution. The idea came about when a company-owned location of Active Green + Ross went to SCP looking for employees.
“They didn’t want our funding; they just wanted to hire the employees that we’d been providing to their franchisees. That‘s when we realized our real aspiration is that every large and medium sized company should have a community hiring program integrated into their recruitment strategy for their entry level employees,” says Young.
“To do that we need to change the way people are hired. You have community and government employment programs and big and medium sized companies with large hiring requirements but for the most part they aren’t hiring from the community agencies, the dots aren’t being connected,” says Young. “We just want to connect the dots.”
And if anyone knows how to connect the dots it’s Young. He says phase three could take another ten years to come to fruition, because it will involve changes in the way employers, community service agencies, governments and existing recruiting firms operate, but the payoff would be huge in creating tens of thousands more job opportunities for people with employment barriers.
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