Ashima and her work with Rubicon and EEE
I’m Ashima and I’m working with Rubicon National Social Innovations this summer (along with Mark!). I’ve been working here for 4 weeks now, and I’m already calling San Francisco a second home. San Francisco is a beautiful city, bustling with innovators, techies, environmentalists and social entrepreneurs. An environmentalist and a wannabe social entrepreneur myself, it’s no wonder I feel like I belong.
Without overlapping too much with what Mark has already posted, I’ll brief you on what Rubicon National (soon to be New Foundry Ventures – we’re rebranding, so I never know what to refer to it as) actually does. RNSI identifies itself as a laboratory for scaling social enterprise. It creates a number of triple bottom line business models, that address a number of our world’s challenges, implements the business models on a local scale and then seeks to scale these social enterprises nationally in order to have a true impact. As a co-worker of mine delicately put it: a think tank for social enterprise that not only thinks, but does.
Hopefully that’s a fair enough explanation of the organization. I have to say, it’s a relief to have an audience that’s even vaguely familiar with the field. I usually lose people at “social enterprise”.
So far this summer I’ve been working on the Energy Efficiency Enterprise (EEE) business model. The EEE is a triple bottom line social venture that provides hard-to-employ workers with training and transitional employment in order to perform energy efficiency retrofits on homes across the US. At the moment, the enterprise is running a pilot business in the bay area (in partnership with a retrofit training organization). In the long run RNSI hopes to learn from this pilot, tweak its business model and then sell the business plan in a “business-in-a-box” manner to a number of different partners in key target cities across the country.
Green jobs, green collar workers, the new green economy… while I’ve been aware of all these phrases for a while now, I never thought I’d be at the forefront of this exciting new field!
To conclude, some more insight on the triple bottom line nature of the work I’m doing.
5 ways in which EEE will have a social impact and is generally an awesome, and very logical, idea:
EEE will train hard-to-employ workers and help them gain employment as green collar workers
EEE will provide these workers with “transitional employment” on the way to a strong career in the new green economy
EEE will help moderate income families cut their energy bills, and hence free up their income for better things
EEE will help moderate-income families have healthier and safer homes (improved air quality inside the house etc.)
EEE will help reduce CO2 emissions nationally – did you know that the residential building sector accounts for 21% of total US CO2 emissions?
