“We are also kicking off the new year with a volunteer day with Cradles to Crayons, which serves 33,000 children annually at its Giving Factory. At the Giving Factory, Seed CX employees will sort and inspect donated items and package them for delivery to the children who need them.”
Last summer, I was enjoying a poke bowl at the French Market for lunch when a gentleman approached me and asked if I could give him money for a transit ticket. He told me that he had a job interview that afternoon, but didn’t have the fare to get there. I had just spent a rather absurd amount of money on my lunch and felt a wave of being incredibly fortunate, so I agreed. I went to the ATM by the Union Station ticket office, withdrew some cash, and handed it over to allow him to purchase a monthly pass.
That might have been the end of the story, except that, by pure chance, I ran into the same gentleman at the same place a few weeks later—and he told me that he’d got the job. He also told me that it was something of a coup for him—he wasn’t always able to make it to interviews, as the round-trip fare is almost $5.00, which isn’t an amount he can always spare.
Charitable Giving the Startup Way
This got me thinking: If the impact of this chance encounter worked out for him, who else might it help?
As a startup founder, my goal is to try to solve problems in new ways. When I saw the impact one transit card had on a stranger’s life, I naturally wondered whether other people might have the same experience—and how setting up a larger-scale program that delivered transit cards might help. So I did some research.
No programs around unemployed transportation existed in Chicago. I, therefore, reached out to a handful of Chicago charities to see whether they were interested in working with me to test a transit card program for job seekers with limited resources.
That outreach led me to meet a board member from Inner Voice, a Chicago nonprofit that offers a continuum of care and focuses on providing individualized services for people experiencing homelessness. I began to learn more about the calculus that unemployed people are forced to make: Food vs. traveling for a job interview that statistically, they are unlikely to secure.
I worked with Inner Voice to set up a pilot program that would test whether the one-off experience I’d had with the man I met by chance could be replicated across a larger cohort.
The Results: 83% Increase in Gainful Employment
We worked with another Chicago nonprofit, Teamwork Englewood, that agreed to track its members’ ability to secure gainful employment without offering transit cards to create a kind of “control” group. What we found was that, without transit assistance, just 47 percent of job seekers (24 out of 51) were employed two weeks after a job event.
Meanwhile, we conducted a pilot program (the Seed Transit Pilot Project) that followed 113 job seekers. Of them, 94 (83 percent) secured gainful employment. In other words, our efforts removed the transportation barrier, offering participants the access and motivation they needed to take the first steps toward seeking employment.
Read the full article here.