Today we are faced by a great need for effective, practical training and employment programmes for individuals facing significant barriers to employment, including homelessness, joblessness, re-entry after addiction rehabilitation, developmental disabilities, lack of marketable skills and prior incarceration.
Catalyst Kitchens, an initiative sprung from FareStart-Seattle ??? a culinary job training and placement programme for homeless and disadvantaged people ??? offers a proven social enterprise model that not only works to alleviate poverty through job training and placement for individuals committed to transforming their lives, but also distributes nutritious food to individuals and families in need.
Catalyst Kitchens is a collaborative network of foodservice social enterprises that is on track to collectively train over 6,000 individuals annually, and provide over 10 million meals to people by 2016. Initially called Kitchens With Mission, it launched in early 2006 and focused on guiding and supporting organisations to develop a social enterprise response to joblessness and food insecurity. We made a very conscious effort to establish key corporate partnerships that would help to strengthen and sustain the programmes.
The most successful and impactful of these partnerships was established with the Starbucks Corporation. Roughly half of all new training enterprises Catalyst Kitchens helped launch were able to take advantage of this sponsorship, or ???hybrid value chain???. Through Catalyst Kitchens, Starbucks provides over $120,000 worth of product and equipment discounts annually, but more significant is that the sponsorship has been fully operationalised by Starbucks, ensuring that benefits are deployed easily and efficiently through Starbucks??? usual business channels ??? thereby ensuring the scalability and sustainability of the sponsorship.
Catalyst Kitchens continues to leverage the collective impact of its members in order to build relationships that are beneficial to the collaborative, including: Component Hardware Group, Wal-Mart, Rouxbe, Monster.com and Mercer Cutlery. Catalyst Kitchens??? ongoing success developing these corporate relationships can all be traced back to the development of its original sponsor, Starbucks.
The keys to the Catalyst Kitchens/Starbucks partnership can be distilled down into five broad strokes:
1. Make sure it???s a two way deal. What have I done for you lately? In order to establish a strong, sustainable relationship, both sides must experience the benefits of partnership. The NGO being sponsored should take on the responsibility of making sure that their corporate sponsor experiences tangible benefits, and the NGO must also make sure that those benefits are understood and recognised by the corporate partner. For example, in each market that the Catalyst Kitchens/Starbucks sponsorship has been deployed, media coverage as well as comments and quotes from the community are passed along to Starbucks corporate. Examples of product and brand placement (annual reports, at community events, etc) are collected and presented to Starbucks ??? without them having to ask for them.
2. Don???t always have your hand out. A true partnership involves more than just money. Corporate partners can be scared off when they think they are only viewed as a source of funds. Sponsorships should be established based on the corporate partner???s products and/or services that can be leveraged for impact in the community. For example, Monster.com???s sponsorship of Catalyst Kitchens is delivered to members in the form of a free annual service (online job postings) that Catalyst Kitchens??? members experience as free but might otherwise cost them thousands of dollars. Monster.com is able to provide this benefit at very little cost to a leveraged network of organisations, and have an impact on our communities without direct funds being involved.
3. Do business THEIR way. Make it easy by using existing business/operational conduits. For example, Component Hardware Group???s (CHG’s) sponsorship of the Catalyst Kitchens network is managed through their regular day-to-day operations, with essential kitchen plumbing products ordered by member agencies and drop shipped by the sponsor CHG as they would to any other business customer. Similarly, Starbucks sponsorship is deployed through their Branded Solutions division. Once approved by Catalyst Kitchens, each member organisation is established as a customer account, and treated as any other customer would be ??? except for the fact that they get a discount of roughly 70% off products and equipment.
4. Ensure efficiency, standards, and accountability. These should be the cornerstones of your relationship management strategies. Your corporate partner wants to know and see proof that you are a well-run organisation that is managing and leveraging their assets well, and utilising them for maximum impact in the community.
5. Leverage collective impact to maximize a corporate partner???s impact. Large-scale social change requires cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organisations. Research by Fay Hanleybrown, John Kania, & Mark Kramer shows that successful collective impact initiatives have five conditions that together produce true alignment and lead to powerful results:
??? A common agenda
??? Shared measurement systems
??? Mutually reinforcing activities
??? Continuous communication
??? Backbone support organisations.
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Shared Value Supply Chains 