Generation Enterprise (GEN): The Business of Youth

In 2015, GEN seeks to reach over 1,000 youth with skills and job opportunities.  Accordingly, we close Q1 with the first of our new skills-building SMEs, Zest Building Services, preparing to bring on its first class of hires. Zest will provide cleaning and building maintenance services to a large anchor client as well as existing residential and office clients.  

When these youth join us in April, they will leave the world of dead-end jobs and precarious informal sector work behind. At Zest, they’ll have training, living wages, and a career path that they can choose to follow all the way from trainee à cleaning crew member à cleaning crew supervisor à account manager à franchise owner.

To help them navigate this empowerment journey, we’ve developed a curriculum and are building a “career map” HR system. It will lay out each step in the Zest career, requirements to unlock the next step (completed training workshops, demonstrated skills on the job), and micro-incentives like bonuses and benefits. Our livelihood + learning model will be part of Zest’s competitive advantage, resulting in better skills, higher retention, and distinctive service.

We are excited about this opportunity from a social impact and financial perspective. It will help us prove the model we designed together, and have huge potential impact. From Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland and Sangu Delle’s Golden Palm VC group (discussed at TED) to Obama’s new TechHire initiative and McKinsey’s Generation project and LinkedIn’s vision “to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” it’s clear we’re on the right track and can make a real contribution to “disrupting unemployment.”

^[1] Small and medium enterprises – formal sector businesses generating revenue to support 10+ employees