The primary focus of SCP since its inception has been on facilitating financing and supporting businesses that employ the disadvantaged.
Our goal has been to prove that hybrid business models - often called social enterprises - can be successful; both financially and socially. In proving their success our goal has been to make them a much more prevalent and accepted way of doing business.
However, we have always recognized that finding a better of way to help the disadvantaged find their way back on their feet is only one of many structural social challenges that we as a society face. We also felt that while we wanted to make it our primary focus, we also had ideas on how to take new, hybrid approaches to other pressing challenges. With that in mind we consciously decided that we would always attempt to dedicate 20% of our time to some of these alternative ideas - we wouldn't make them our primary focus but perhaps in discussing these and making the initial case for a new approach we could act as a catalyst to put other organizations or institutions to take the lead.
Need for a Social Capital Marketplace
The first catalyst area we focused on was how to create a more dynamic social capital marketplace in Canada. Our belief is that there is a real lack of financial instruments for non-profits to use (the almost exclusive financing tool is a "grant" to finance a "program") and a real shortage of value propositions for "investors" (primarily a tax receipt for a donation).
We undertook a study to find innovative approaches to funding social initiatives in Canada. In this exploration, we had the help of RBC Capital Markets to study the parallels between private sector capital markets and the market for social capital. The focus of this part of the study was to look at opportunities to adapt financial vehicles that fund unique private sector organizations to fund social initiatives. To provide a relevant context for this inquiry, we also looked at existing research from Canada and other countries related to social investment to learn from others experience and be able to create next steps for SCP based on our findings. Please see SCP Ideas and Learning section for the "Creating Risk Capital for Social Initiatives" summary presentation of this study and other related presentations and links.
Switching Gears
Similar to our investment focus evolving over the years, so has our catalyst strategy. It stemmed from some early feedback from our initial franchise partner - Active Green + Ross - and from other senior executives at national Canadian companies.
We launched our franchise strategy in 2006 with Active Green + Ross - an Ontario based full service car care franchise network. Luckily for us they agreed to be our first franchise pilot program to test the feasibility and fit of our mission driven financing with entrepreneurs looking to acquire an AG+R franchise. Three years later we are working 21 different AG + R locations and all the corporate locations are also using the social hiring program.
We knew there was something going on when shortly after we finalized our first loan with a location in Hamilton, Ontario, AG+R expressed interest in using the social hiring channels SCP facilitates access to for all of their corporate store locations - locations not tied to SCP's mission through financing. We realized that we did not need the carrot of our financing to encourage AG+R to recruit through social hiring channels. If AG+R corporate locations got on board, what about other Canadian companies that don't need our financing but want to do social hiring?
Change HR
We began asking ourselves - how we can transform the way Canadian companies think about and organize their HR functions? In particular, how they think about, invest in and manage their entry level employees.
We knew we needed to sufficiently study this opportunity in order to know how to address it. For this, we turned to our partner, the Monitor Group, who have helped SCP since our inception. In Fall 2008, Monitor assigned a consulting team tasked with helping us understand and frame the scope of this opportunity. We are now refining these ideas around the "employer recruiting value chain" and the Canadian social hiring landscape with key stakeholder groups. Find our more in the Ideas and Learning section.