The social entrepreneur

Enterprise: Stella Burry Community Services
Focus: mental health advocacy
2010 EOY category: Social services

Most successful executives achieve recognition for growing a business with critical thinking, passion, and creativity. For Jocelyn Greene, those qualities enable her to help disadvantaged adults get well, and to find work and affordable housing.

The executive director of Stella Burry Community Services in St. John’s may be a career social worker, but she tackles mental health issues and public housing as tenaciously as the wiliest CEO. When she started working at Emmanuel House in 1987 (the organization that eight years later would become Stella Burry Community Services), it had fewer than 20 employees and offered a residential counselling-and-treatment program. Under her leadership, it has grown into an operation with 120 employees, an annual payroll of $4.6 million, capital assets of $8.6 million, 85 affordable rental units, and The Hungry Heart Café.

The café opened in 2008 to complement the employment-preparation programs Stella Burry provides to 100 people each year. Intended to give people training under a professional chef, the café has graduated 70 students with a 75% employment rate, spawned a popular catering business, and was named by a local newspaper as one of the top 10 restaurants in
St. John’s in its first year of business.

Now there are plans to expand the cafe and catering to provide more training for adults. “Everyone has value and hidden gifts,” says Greene. “We just have to help uncover them.”

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What was your first job? In Grade 9 I worked on the bottling line at the local Coca-Cola factory—eight hours watching bottles go by! What’s your personality type? Extroverted. I’m passionate, ambitious, and determined to make a difference. How did your childhood influence the person you are today? I had a consistent message from my mother, who kept telling me I could be anything I wanted to be. What characteristics are needed to run a successful organization? Have vision. Don’t accept the status quo. Be an advocate. Be willing to try new things. What’s the next big trend in your industry, and what are you doing to prepare for it? We intend to use social enterprise as a vehicle to help people become attached to the labour market. We plan to operate businesses that will train participants to take advantage of anticipated labour market shortages. We’re piloting an expansion of our café operation that will emulate the Kitchens With Mission initiative, operating in 100 U.S. cities. What was your defining moment as a social entrepreneur? The day the Hungry Heart Café opened to the public and people flocked to the door. What has been your most significant triumph? Becoming one of the leading developers of rental housing in the province. What’s the best thing about running an organization like yours? It’s rewarding as well as fun. Right now Newfoundland and Labrador is booming, and we have a great political climate to support social enterprise. And the toughest? Rapid growth. We had to create the administrative infrastructure necessary to support the organization. How can we develop more of a culture that encourages and celebrates social entrepreneurship? We need to demonstrate its effectiveness. We’ll be evaluating our new program and hopefully will have the data to prove that it can help people become participating members of their communities. For you, what is progress? Seeing people whose lives have been transformed through work. How are you different today than when you started in the business? As a social worker in a residential treatment program, my focus was treatment and rehabilitation. While we still provide good therapeutic programming, our focus has shifted to developing programs and services that will really help people become part of their communities—with a home, a job, and friends. What are you reading right now? Uncharitable by Dan Pallotta.