Our belief is that if appropriate paid employment and work environments are provided for disadvantaged groups, we can help these individuals lead more self-sufficient, productive, and fulfilling lives. Our goal is to ensure that the businesses that provide these work environments reach break-even or better so that we can accomplish these social goals at a lower societal cost. In order to measure the success of our mission, we factor our target employee’s progress toward a sustainable livelihood plus the profitability of our social enterprise. We consider success to have been reached when both the target employee and the social enterprise become self-sufficient.

We view success through both a qualitative and quantitative lens. From a qualitative standpoint, we utilize the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to determine whether the target employees are developing the personal assets necessary to become self-sufficient. Increasingly, poverty studies both domestically and internationally point to the lack of assets – financial, social, physical, and natural – as a key indicator for why certain groups slip into and/or cannot move out of poverty. The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework is an asset based approach that provides a useful context from which to understand where individuals are now, where they want to go, and how they want to get there. To learn more about this framework please go to www.livelihoods.org.

We see our SROI report cards as a litmus test for our investments – how well are we achieving our mission? - and a tool for strategic management of social enterprises. Since our particular brand of social enterprise encompasses a social mission delivered through a business, we believe that the Social Return on Investment framework makes sense as it takes into consideration both the financial and social mission outcomes of the enterprise. In other words, we recognize that our ‘blended value’ business model requires a blended value evaluation tool to measure success.

In finding the balance between the two missions, we believe that a SROI framework and reporting system generates a composite number for both bottom lines in an appropriate way to judge performance.

We are still in an early stage in this process and our methodology and constructs are evolving but with the understanding and experience we have now gained, we recognize the need for a contextual background to better understand and interpret SCP SROI Report Cards.