A Bold Shift: Deepening My Commitment to Social Enterprise
by Carmen Dahlberg, Belle Detroit
The United States is ripe for adopting a new way of marrying the charitable and market-driven space to bring justice, equity, and opportunities to members of our community most in need of them.
We met upstairs at the former St. Cecilia Catholic School, in a fully stocked computer lab which, like much of Detroit, had fallen silent in Covid. Gone were the senior computer classes on Saturdays. Gone were the jobs for the hairdressers and the nursing assistants. And gone was Head Start, which had provided their childcare.
But spread two computers apart, masks clinging to our faces in the July heat, fan humming, with onsite childcare down the hall, we began. On our first day, we guided three trainees through the basics: how to turn on the computer and find and open Photoshop. Over the next twelve weeks, along with a handful of design instructors, I trained these three moms in graphic design, web design, and marketing. By the end of the program, they were designing websites in WordPress and Squarespace, editing graphics in Photoshop, creating logos in Illustrator, and analyzing campaigns on Facebook. Upon graduation, they took on paid projects for our clients — all nonprofits, social enterprises, and purpose-driven businesses.
Their (and our!) digital media impact exploded, a testament to our moms’ talent, and their computer and marketing skills did, too. Yet beyond learning new technical skills, they gained confidence. Their success in the program permitted them to think boldly about what they wanted, and what they could have. It allowed them to see that they were uniquely skilled and creative and could do hard things. It opened doors for them to explore what was next.
A Hard Pivot: Taking to the Law to Compound My Impact
This was Belle Detroit, a company I started when I was a student at the University of Michigan. I was no stranger to campus activism by the time I entered my junior year; but English 326, titled “Community Writing and Public Culture — The Portfolio Project,” changed my trajectory.
Over a series of weekly visits to Lincoln Center in Highland Park, I met with a juvenile sex offender in a writing mentorship program through the Prison Creative Arts Project. This dislodged my path to a PhD in English. Suddenly academia felt too insular. Suddenly I hungered to solve the crises that had led that young man to a juvenile sentence. I thought I might start a justice-oriented nonprofit of my own one day. But as I moved through marketing management positions in New York and Michigan, I discovered social enterprises, and I fell in love.
Running Belle Detroit, a low-profit limited liability company, exposed me to the challenges of sustaining a social enterprise model in a country that constrains charitable work to a small section of the Internal Revenue Code. I found that even less philanthropic funding is available to social enterprises than to tax-exempt organizations. Likewise, the costs of training and hiring beneficiaries, in addition to paying living wages, make it hard for social enterprises to compete with other for-profit entities. Faced with shuttering their doors or pivoting, social enterprises in the United States often end up adding a 501c3 to their companies to keep their mission-driven operations afloat.
When Belle Detroit’s turn came, I realized I could scale Belle Detroit by pursuing a fiscal sponsorship — or I could pioneer the large-scale advocacy and adoption of social enterprises through legal education.
Revisioning: New Thoughts on What Impact Looks Like
Life inside a social enterprise often allows us to see what the law and justice look like in action, beyond courtroom walls. It allows us to provide opportunities for disadvantaged members of our society, and change how we think about and do business across industries.
A law degree will help me bring justice to the places in our communities where justice has not been fully realized. It will allow me to assist social enterprises in creating scalable models. It will give me the tools to navigate bureaucracy and empower clients to do the same. It will provide me with opportunities to normalize new, creative, and essential business structures that will turn benefit corporations and low-profit limited liability companies into household names. And it will allow me to help companies integrate social benefit into their business models through operating agreements and contracts, achieving greater impact and more equitable solutions than training one cohort at a time.
Advocacy is sometimes present in a courtroom, but it also often presents itself in business contracts and hiring decisions, in how we spend our money and who gets to make the products we want. The United States is ripe for adopting a new way of marrying the charitable and market-driven space to bring justice, equity, and opportunities to members of our community most in need of them.
I begin this next chapter inspired by the worldwide social enterprise community, a collective of organizations often working upstream to benefit people and the planet through their innovation. How much more we can accomplish together, both stateside and across the globe, through policies that prioritize mission! For my part, that work continues in Detroit, a city that, like its people, faces east in perpetual and resilient hope for a new dawn.
Carmen Dahlberg is the founder of Belle Detroit, an employer consulting agency providing communications strategy, policy analysis, workplace assessments, pilot program design services, parental leave support, and employee resource gap assistance to companies that make money to do good. Belle Detroit is a verified social enterprise and a proud Social Enterprise Alliance member.
