The Young and the Generous

Meet the new generation of philanthropists. They’re young, they’re wealthy, and they don’t just write checks. They’re ready to roll up their sleeves, but — in return — they expect tangible results.

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Lorne Adrain, Chuck Holland

SOCIAL VENTURE PARTNERS OF RHODE ISLAND

Howie Sneider didn’t join the staff of The Steel Yard because he wanted to hone his business skills. “I just want to make stuff,” says Sneider, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate who specializes in sculpture and metalworking. As Public Projects and Urban Furniture coordinator, however, Sneider finds himself running what has become a micro-manufacturing arm of this nonprofit school for the industrial arts.

Orders stream in for all kinds of functional (and nonfunctional) metal art, like the funky garbage cans along Wickenden Street, and the bicycles spinning atop metal poles on the bike path in Olneyville. This year, his department is projected to do about $150,000 in sales, money that will be reinvested in The Steel Yard’s studio facilities and youth programming.

Since the nonprofit opened four years ago in the old Providence Steel and Iron Co. plant, this side business has mushroomed on its own. Eager to maintain that momentum, but unsure how best to build the business, the organization this year turned to a group of business-savvy philanthropists, Social Venture Partners of Rhode Island (www.svpri.org). The executives and entrepreneurs who are members of SVPRI invest both time and money ($2,500 a year each) in helping nonprofits establish income-producing social enterprises. In The Steel Yard’s case, they’re advising Sneider and his colleagues on how to write a formal business plan that will shape the manufacturing operation’s future. “They’re successful from a demand perspective,” says Lorne Adrain, a Providence-based life insurance and estate planning specialist who co-founded SVPRI in 2002. “We’re trying to help them  flesh out, how do we meet this demand? Should we limit our product line? Should we subcontract with other pockets of artists?”

SVPRI’s style of “giving” allows Adrain, fifty-three, and the other partners to connect with their causes and, more importantly from their perspective, to stick with them, providing guidance and tracking progress for several years. Based on the first SVP organization started in Seattle about ten years ago, it’s an approach that appeals to younger entrepreneurial types who “are less trusting that good will be done, and more interested in looking under the covers to see what is going on in an organization we support,” says Chuck Holland, who recently replaced Adrain as SVPRI’s chairman.

Holland began checking out causes about six years ago when, after his second or third computer start-up, he found he’d lost interest in the high-tech rat race.  “I wanted more value out of what I did. If I did another start-up, it would be to have more money, and that’s it,” says Holland. Having made his technology fortune relatively early in life, Holland, now fifty-six, decided to redirect his entrepreneurial energy toward nonprofits. He was a founding partner and executive director of a SVP chapter in Boston before moving to Warwick fulltime two years ago.

SVPRI doesn’t award grants, but instead loans money as “business capital” through their Social Enterprise Fund, established with an initial $50,000 challenge grant from another partner, David Mixer, a venture capitalist. The fund now totals more than $125,000. The first nonprofit to benefit was Amos House, the soup kitchen and social service agency in Providence, which used $30,000 in no-interest loans to ex-pand a food service business that generates income and jobs for clients (see “At Your Service,” page 91). The business has recently branched out from supplying lunches to charter schools to catering private events.

SVPRI solicits proposals from nonprofits once a year — the more promising the project, the more likely it is to catch someone’s interest. “To date, it’s sort of worked as an opportunistic funnel,” Adrain says. “At the top are the nonprofits we’re talking to from all over the state. Then, at the bottom of the funnel, one of the partners has to raise his hand and say, ‘I’ll own this.

I’ll make this happen.’ ”