The Galvanizing Effect Of The Social Enterprise In Action

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Forbes, December 27, 2019

by Michael Gretczko



photo: GETTY

I love seeing how the blue water of the Caribbean meets the white sands of Puerto Rico from the air. In October, after landing, I didn’t go to the beach. Instead, I headed into downtown San Juan, where I joined 22 of my colleagues — all just a few years out of school and eager to make a difference not only in our organization, but also in people’s lives in the world at large.

They were in San Juan to participate in our Human Capital People to People (P2P) program; I was there to support them as an advisor and mentor. P2P is a skills-based volunteering initiative where our junior professionals undertake an intensive week-long pro bono engagement to support local nonprofit organizations. As with all of our volunteering programs, we were there to bring our greatest asset — the skills and experience of our people — to help nonprofits address their most critical issues and help drive transformational outcomes.

For me, the week in San Juan was a firsthand example of the benefits that a social enterprise can generate. At Deloitte, we define the social enterprise as a company whose mission combines revenue growth and profit-making with the need to respect and support its environment and stakeholder network. It is a business that embraces its responsibility to the community and serves as a role model to other organizations and its people.

The most obvious beneficiaries of P2P engagements are the nonprofits themselves. Many nonprofits find it challenging to muster the skills, data and resources they need to carry out their missions. They usually have very clear missions and well-articulated programs for achieving them, but they tend to struggle with how to deliver against overwhelming and competing demands with limited resources as well as operational execution challenges. Our teams quickly zeroed in on opportunities to improve back-office operations to create front-office or, more appropriately, mission-driven impacts. Read the rest here.