Good morning.
I intend to focus my comments on the need to provide employment services and supports as mechanisms to promote recovery from mental illness and other disabilities and to help reduce poverty among persons with a disability. I also want to focus your attention on social enterprise as an innovative and cost-effective vehicle to create employment and wealth in the charitable non-profit sector.
All of us sitting in this room derive some, if not most, of our identity from what we do for a living. How many social situations do we find ourselves in when the first question we are asked is, “And what do you do?” Imagine the implications of answering, “Nothing”, or “I don't work, I depend on social assistance”. These are hardly answers that boost self-esteem or self-confidence. Unless we win the lottery, it is difficult to raise oneself above the poverty line without some form of paid employment.
Historically, accessing supported employment has been viewed unrealistically for many severely disabled persons. Many employers do not view the disabled as a valuable labour pool. Many mental health providers and service providers for persons with severe cognitive impairments view community-based competitive employment as unrealistic for many of the individuals they support.
As someone who has designed and provided support in employment services to severely disabled persons for over 20 years, I know this to be a myth. The Causeway Work Centre has placed and supported hundreds of persons with severe mental illness over its 30-year history. The technology exists and has existed for over 20 years. If that is the case, why aren't more severely disabled persons working?
The following, in my view, are at least some of the reasons.
There is a lack of incentives to do so. Most social assistance programs do little to provide the needed incentive to individuals contemplating a return or an initial entry to work. Either there is minimal financial incentive, onerous earning reporting requirements, or there is the constant fear of being cut off health benefits. Although there have been improvements made in the structure of social assistance over the past few years, the financial rewards reaped from going to work are often insufficient to lift a more severely disabled person out of poverty.
Employers are offered little incentive to hire persons with severe disabilities. The Ontario government enacted the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act in 2005, and it is currently developing employment accessibility standards for all Ontario employers. As a member of the standards development committee, I'm concerned that we're more focused on sticks than we are on carrots. I would prefer a balanced approach similar to the Americans with Disabilities Act, adopted in the U.S. in the nineties, that builds in a strong tax incentive for employers who hire disabled workers.
There is a hodgepodge of government-funded programs to assist persons with severe disabilities to return to work. Whether municipal, federal, or provincial, each has its own set of admission criteria, permissible services to be offered, and most include time-limited supports, which, particularly for persons with a mental illness, do not meet the challenges imposed by what is often a cyclical illness.
Programs within sister ministries are not coordinated and rarely support each other to maximize results for the disabled worker. Many government-funded employment programs do not view the disabled worker holistically. Supports to employment are restricted to employment only, on-the-job training, or workplace-specific issues, while other negative events in an individual's life that will likely lead to a job loss are outside the scope of permissible service provision. An individual may be in jeopardy of losing his or her housing and under some employment-funded programs will be required to wait for a referral to a housing support worker or a case manager. The employment support worker will be restricted from intervening and must stand by and watch, hoping things work out before the disabled worker loses his or her job.
This is not solely the fault of government and government programs. Service providers do not always cooperate in a manner that is most beneficial to the disabled worker. Turf protection, restricted caseloads, and misplaced priorities also influence the way service providers behave.
The solutions are not tremendously complicated. Social assistance programs can be structured to encourage returning to work. Levels of government can cooperate and structure programs to work collaboratively, and, by doing so, eliminate duplication and save taxpayers money. Best practice models can be adopted and funded so that the disabled persons receive the support they need to find employment and, most importantly, to keep employment. Employers can be provided financial incentives to hire disabled workers.
In addition to the above, we need to explore innovative solutions to creating employment and eliminating poverty. One of the most promising, yet underdeveloped, approaches in this country is social enterprise. The definition of social enterprise varies from country to country, and within cultures, but in a Canadian context we can define a social enterprise as an organization of business that uses the market-oriented production and sale of goods and/or services to pursue a public benefit mission. Social enterprises may take many forms, located on a spectrum from traditional grant-funded charitable or non-profits at one end and pure-for-business at the other end.
I want to focus on the social-purpose business, established to pursue, in equal measure, a defined public benefit and economic benefit. These are often referred to as double or triple bottom-line businesses because they measure their performance in terms of positive social and/or environmental impacts as well as economic profits.
Causeway Work Centre operates three social enterprises: Krackers Katering, Good Nature Groundskeeping, and Cycle Salvation. These three enterprises were developed to create competitive employment for severely mentally ill persons and to show by example how it is possible for disabled workers to contribute to the community's economic growth and well-being. All three businesses embrace a double bottom line. They earn financial revenues and support business expenses and the wages of the workers while social revenues are produced in the form of healthy, productive workers who are able to maintain competitive employment. In 2007, Causeway's three social enterprises provided competitive wages to 107 severely mentally ill workers, and they earned in excess of $150,000 of earned revenues. All three businesses continue to work towards self-sufficiency.
Canada's not-for-profit sector is economically significant. It currently represents $120 billion in annual expenditures, more than Canada's retail, mining, or oil and gas sectors. With government and philanthropy reaching their expenditure limits, engaging private capital represents our best strategy for growing the sector to meet new and expanding public needs and be more innovative in how we respond to our worsening economic climate.
The non-profit sector currently has very limited access to the financial tools available to the private sector. Many non-profits do not seek alternative forms of capital because they lack business expertise, they are wary of associated risks of borrowing, or they do not have a business model to support debt financing. Regulatory barriers also prevent charities and non-profits from structuring and financing social enterprises.
Private sector investors face additional challenges. Lack of tax incentives or other government-sponsored approaches to mitigating risk also discourage institutional investors from participating in this market. Despite these challenges, sectors like affordable housing have begun to connect to the private capital market and create badly needed housing stock.
In order to grow the employment opportunities available to the vehicle of social enterprise and to lessen dependency on government granting, we need to build an effective social capital marketplace in Canada. We need to move from our current stage of sporadic, uncoordinated innovation and put policies, regulatory frameworks, incentives, and infrastructure in place to harness the value social enterprise offers and enable the private capital flows that will drive it.
For the past decade in particular, federal and provincial governments have been beating the self-sufficiency drum. They have been encouraging charities and non-profits to work more collaboratively, to utilize evidence-based approaches, to aspire to self-sufficiency, and to tap into the private sector rather than government for financing.
Certainly as it relates to employment for the disabled and the disadvantaged, social enterprise is a perfect storm of many of these ideals. But we, the non-profit sector, cannot do it alone. We need government to create and encourage the regulatory-friendly environment necessary to promote social enterprise innovation.
Thank you.