Getting Better At Doing Good

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The dual bottom line was the challenge for Lisa Schorr when she signed on with Pine Street Inn as director of business-enterprise development. PSI, New England's largest nonprofit for the homeless, provides shelters and services for 11,000 people a day, many of them considered hard-core unemployable. A program that offered job training and supplied used clothing to the homeless had inadequate funding. Schorr, who had just received her M.B.A. from Harvard, came up with a plan to expand PSI's work and make it financially self-sufficient. "The idea," she says, "was to kill two birds with one stone."

Looking at Pine Street from a manager's point of view, Schorr saw an underutilized resource. PSI had no means of sorting all the clothing, and half of it was being sold off cheaply in bulk. The program was costing the organization $200,000 a year more than it got under a contract with the commonwealth. Her analysis showed that by training Pine Street's men and women to sort the clothing by size and type, the donations could be more efficiently distributed and provide high-quality merchandise for the agency's two thrift shops. Since the summer of 1998, some 50 people have completed a six-month training program at Pine Street's sprawling warehouse in Boston's Jamaica Plain, handling about 5,000 lbs. of clothing a day. For the first time, the operation is becoming self-sustaining, and, says Schorr, "we are now funding a training program that we might otherwise have had to close." It's a better way of doing good, and for social entrepreneurs, that is the real bottom line.