Social Enterprises in the Heartland
JustMeans.com
August 17, 2010
From JustMeans.com:
120 years ago, prior to the emergence of social enterprises let alone the establishment of the Social Enterprise Association, back when Chicago was the fastest growing city on the globe, the Heartland Alliance materialized to address the myriad needs of people struggling to overcome poverty, social marginalization, or inimitable vulnerability due legal or medical problems. Spawning from the Chicago Travelers Aid and Hull House organizations that assisted people new to Chicago, particularly women and youth, with housing, employment, assimilation and resettlement issues, the Travelers Aid of Metropolitan Chicago merged the two non-profits into a single entity that evolved with the local and national culture during the Depression, post-war era, large-scaled waves of immigration and social change. As homelessness reached pandemic proportions in the 1980s, the organization became one of the first to respond, birthing the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and co-founding the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. In 1995, the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights name was formally adopted to more adequately reflect an expanding portfolio of services: housing, health care, economic security, and legal protections services. Today, the organization focuses its resources and efforts on human rights. By assisting those living in poverty or danger of violence to improve their lives, the current day organization facilitates realization of their inherent and legally mandated human rights. Too frequently, those fleeing from violence or multi-generational poverty have no other place to find individualized help than through the Heartland Alliance.
Today, the Heartland Alliance performs much of its work through three wholly-owned subsidiaries and one affiliate: Heartland Housing, Inc.; Heartland Alliance Health, Inc.; Heartland Human Care Services, Inc.; and Heartland International Health Center, respectively. Their unique corporate structure creates a strategic advantage ensuring continued growth, financial flexibility, a diversified portfolio of services, and extensive opportunities to leverage resources. By also providing Cross-Cultural Interpreting Services as well as a Social IMPACT Research Center, the organization has effectively created additional streams of revenue while fulfilling a unique, cost-effect option for other organizations. Through the Cross-Cultural Interpreting Services program, Heartland Alliance offers a cost-effective, high-quality interpretation and translation service inmore than 30 languages with interpreters and translators professionally trained in health care, legal, and community services interpretation and translation. As a full-service research and evaluation resource, the Heartland Alliance Social IMPACT Research Center, commonly referred to as simply IMPACT, facilitates other organizations’ efforts to raise awareness of social issues such as poverty, homelessness, affordable housing, health care, human rights, employment, income supports, and asset development. IMPACT promotes solutions designed to enhance the quality of life for poor and low-income individuals by evaluating programs, conducting customized market studies, analyzing policies, documenting systems, and producing final evaluation reports to inform community leaders, policymakers, and program operators of strengths and weaknesses of their impact on social issues.