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Chapter 1 - What is Eva's Phoenix?
Chapter 2 - Eva's National Initiative
Chapter 3 - Homeless Youth - Who Are They?
Chapter 4 - Effective Programs
for Homeless Youth
Chapter 5 - Developing the Vision
for Eva's Phoenix
Chapter 6 - Turning the Vision into Reality
Chapter 7 - Developing Strategic Partnerships
Chapter 8 - Working with Funders
Chapter 9 - Youth Goal-Setting and
Case Management Approach
Chapter 10 - Working with Youth
Chapter 11 - Mentorship
Chapter 12 - Working with Staff
Chapter 13 - Making the Transition
to Community
Chapter 14 - Social Enterprise
Chapter 15 - Evaluation
Chapter 16 - Policies and Procedures

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Chapter 14 - Social Enterprise

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The Strategic Review

A review of the program – coordinated by Andrew Macdonald and which included broad participation from staff, trainees and graduates, and industry representatives (with support from the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto) – concluded that the Print Shop had sufficient strengths and opportunities to significantly increase the number of youth opportunities, and to increase its business cost recovery to 100%. This would be possible if certain key weaknesses in the program were thoroughly addressed, including:

  • The part-time operational team: All program staff, including the Manager, had been working on a part-time basis, meaning nobody had adequate time to fully develop the business or the training programs;
  • Reliance on HRSDC funding: The training program had been supported through funding from HRSDC, which paid for job development staff as well as the salaries of the youth. This relationship has been fraught with organizational problems that are common to HRSDC-funded organizations:
    • The time period required to approve funding was extremely long. This resulted in considerable uncertainty for Eva’s Phoenix, and also a gap between when one funded program ended and the beginning of the next. As a result, the organization found it very difficult to plan and recruit participants for new rounds of training. As well, program staff were placed in a very difficult position because they did not know if their contracts would be renewed;
    • HRSDC frequently changed their criteria, their deadlines for applications, as well as their policies and procedures for applying for funding, which further added to the uncertainty;
    • HRSDC demands for preparatory work on the proposal were very onerous, and the organization did not receive any compensation for time spent on this work.
  • Training and production were too tightly interwoven: The expectation that youth who were in training to learn the trade would also be able to respond to the demands of actual print jobs led to too many compromises between these competing demands – the training suffered in the face of “work” demands.
  • Inconsistent quality and timeliness of work: The commercial work also suffered for two reasons. First, the trainees were still learning the trade and were sometimes unable to complete jobs as quickly, or to the level of quality demanded by the clients. In addition, the intermittent funding status of the program made it difficult to go after business contracts in any concentrated way, since the Print Shop did not know what kind of staffing it would be able to count on to manage the work.

 

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