This month, 12 innovative social entrepreneurs will join the Stand Together Foundation’s growing Catalyst Community. Over the next six months, these leaders will receive coaching in organizational and leadership development along with peer networking opportunities to help their transformative organizations grow and scale.

Each of the newest partners is an innovative, social entrepreneur-led organization that’s doing work to break the cycle of poverty and empower individuals to achieve their full potential.

Addiction Recovery, Mental Health & Trauma

• Blue Monarch (Hillsboro, TN) assists women and their children who are dealing with addiction, domestic violence, and economic hardship to transform in mind, body, and spirit by providing a nurturing and therapeutic environment  to achieve sobriety, enhance mother and child relationships, and build better life skills.

Youth

• SCS Noonan Scholars (Boston, MA) helps equip high-achieving, low-income and underrepresented students achieve their full career potential through a bevy of programs to help them get into and graduate from top colleges. 

Homelessness

• LifeWorks (Austin, TX) is deeply committed to providing young people and their families pathways to self-sufficiency through 19 programs designed to help those in crisis to find housing, employment and the mental health care they need. 

Workforce Development

• Generation (Washington, D.C.) provides skills training to unemployed and underemployed young people, empowering them to build sustainable careers and connecting employers to the highly skilled, motivated talent they’re seeking.
• Hot Bread Kitchen (New York, NY) creates economic opportunity through careers in food for US-born and immigrant women with profound barriers to stable employment by providing culinary job training, incubating growing food businesses, and creating jobs at their East Harlem facility.
• Skills for Chicagoland’s Future (Chicago, IL) works to match businesses that have current, unmet hiring needs with qualified, unemployed and underemployed job seekers, serving as a trusted partner to help both employers and those facing chronic unemployment achieve their potential.

• unCommon Construction (New Orleans, LA) uses the building process to empower youth to lead the workforce after high school or college. During a paid internship with unCommon Construction, students develop career awareness and exposure, technical and soft skills, and leadership abilities through a work-based learning experience in a real-world classroom.

Criminal Justice

• BronxConnect (New York, NY) utilizes asset-based mentoring to connect court-involved and high-risk youth and young adults with positive local community resources, keeping youth out of jail for life and empowering them to re-build community from within.
• The Redemption Project (Bloomington, MN) believes that providing meaningful employment for formerly incarcerated individuals will have a positive impact on breaking the cycle of recidivism. The organization partners with employers to provide inmates with corporate mentoring opportunities while still incarcerated, helping them to secure stable employment upon their release.

Economic Mobility

• Brilliant Detroit (Detroit, MI) works to build child-successful families and neighborhoods where children ages 0-8 have what they need to be school-ready, healthy, and self-sufficient.  

• On The Road Lending (Dallas, TX) provides vehicle selection assistance and long-term financial mentoring to help low-income individuals and families overcome transportation barriers so they can get to work, lead healthier lives, and avoid predatory lending.

• Rocky Mountain MicroFinance Institute (Denver, CO) is a community creating economic and social mobility through entrepreneurship. They enable curious people to transform into serious entrepreneurs through personal, business, and financial investments, and build community wealth through strategic investments in people and business to reimagine social and economic inclusion.

Learn more about Stand Together’s economic progress efforts.

For more information on Stand Together Foundation’s Catalyst Program or to apply to join their next cohort, click here.