Social Impact Blog

Eddie Rapp operates two social enterprises owned by Lutheran Social Services. The businesses are dedicated to moving men out of homeless shelters by providing supportive employment to residents in the Lancaster shelter system. Fairhaven Lawn Care and Patriot Pride Painting have a customer mix that is 60 percent commercial and 40 percent residential, with Franklin […]

Social enterprise pursues market expansion, profit growth in pursuit of serving those with less. A lot has changed over the past two years at Double Comfort Foods. Gone is the Short North restaurant that once occupied 505 N. High St. in Columbus. Gone is the staff who worked the front and back of house. And […]

Freedom a la Cart offers drop-off catering for breakfast and lunch as the foundation for employment, workforce training, and supportive services for survivors of human trafficking. Working closely with the special docket Catch Court in Franklin County, the organization has shown remarkable success in changing lives: 85 percent of Freedom a la Cart employees stayed out […]

When HonestJobs.co and Nature’s Touch Landscaping & Lawn Care were named winners of The Metropreneur’s annual Social Enterprise of the Year Awards presented in partnership with SocialVentures at Aspire 2019, there were no red carpets, no smoke machines, gold statuettes, or long-winded, political speeches. For Ramona Wheeler of Nature’s Touch and Harley Blakeman of HonestJobs.co, […]

Apply by Tuesday, Nov. 12, for your chance to cash in on more than $100,000 in donations & funding Over the past half dozen years, Philanthropitch, the social impact fast-pitch competition, has been on a mission to scale innovative nonprofits in communities around the nation. Presented by the AEP Foundation and featuring SocialVentures as a […]

Farm-to-table food-grower preps for sustainability, 2020 launch John Schrock is an engineer who has an idea for how to transform the farm-to-table movement. Having worked on the concept for several years, this summer he plugged into SEA Change, an accelerator program in central Ohio focused on jumpstarting social enterprises. Roots Up will manufacture and operate […]

Social entrepreneurs are the new generation of change agents in Columbus because they combine social impact with strong business sense. In 2015, SocialVentures could count only 18 such businesses, but now they number more than 100. These are the entrepreneurs who last year created 253 new jobs for people who have typically been excluded from […]

Institute rethinking what leads schools, students to improvement School Performance Institute launched as the learning and improvement arm of the nonprofit United Schools Network. Its core purpose is to study and spread school design and improvement best practices to high poverty schools. It combines what it has learned from more than 120 school visits across […]

The social enterprise sector in Central Ohio has expanded from 18 businesses to almost 100 since the launch of SocialVentures in 2014, accounting for nearly 2,400 jobs and $49 million in payroll. The sector has become the largest local job creator for individuals traditionally excluded from employment: ex-offenders, recovering addicts, survivors of trafficking, chronically homeless, […]

When Lisa Hinkelman tells the story of Ruling Our Experiences (ROX)—its start, its (and her) growing pains, and its growing relevance today—it sounds remarkably like a metaphor for the social enterprise universe in which her now eight-year-old nonprofit operates. When Hinkelman formally founded ROX in 2011, she recalls that not only was there no one in the […]