The vision of Pivotal is to be the model proving that societal needs can be integrated into successful and sustainable business environments.
The mission of Pivotal is to elevate the potential of individuals in a supportive manner while providing flexible services to our customers that meet or exceed their specific needs.
Incorporated in 1994, Pivotal evolved from a hospital workshop programme becoming independent of funding in 1997. Now, reliant upon sales revenues alone, the company employs an inclusive workforce supporting development of individual skills to achieve self-sustaining lifestyles. Pivotal will lead the concept of dual bottom-line companies in Ontario. Partnering with business, social, and educational communities, Pivotal will provide multi-dimensional supports and options to assist disenfranchised people in becoming active, independent and participating citizens.
About the Innovative Program
Pivotal entered a market that had two service options - private business or workshop programming. Highly subsidized workshops had set the market standard for not-for-profits and were charitably deemed to provide low-cost services with a questionable capacity to meet business demands. Tending to be exclusive networks providing clients with work activities to supplement disability allowances, they created work-settings publicly viewed as employing disabilities and limitations rather than people.
Welfare cutbacks produced a plethora of funded job training and placement programmes flooding the market with theory-trained programme applicants. The pressure on business to employ agency-people with limited work skills added to their scepticism of not-for-profits’ ability to understand the business market.
From the outset, Pivotal sought to fill the gaps in unemployment programmes to stabilized lifestyles. Funded programmes existed to teach people how to get jobs, write resumes and the basics of being an employee, but no one was showing people how to be an employee nor were they giving those who needed, a means to prove their employability. It was assumed that being able to work and being employable was one in the same, when, in fact, many people find keeping a job very difficult because of personal issues and histories.
Pivotal entered a developing outsourcing business market while building an unproven strategic concept. It carried forward government debts, no financial resources, an inexperienced management team and an inherited workforce having highly demanding medical conditions.
With no roadmap or understanding of a social enterprise, it struggled daily to hold the dream and build the business without submitting to funded-programming. The stigma of being a not-for-profit meant having to fight to gain the respect of the business market both in services rendered and in pricing strategies. Pivotal had to prove that, like all businesses, it had the right and the need to make a profit.
Being left to survive on profits alone, Pivotal turned to its customer base and saw an opportunity to be a viable business while still employing a disenfranchised employment base.
Building upon the work opportunities and profits of the company, Pivotal set out to develop a new means to deliver services to a segment of society outside of regular service delivery points. It was a new business concept that measured success in two ways – in the viability of the company and in the ability to assist employees in stabilizing their lives to achieve sustainable employment and lifestyles. The company would integrate a business mandate with a social mission to create a hybrid that factors strategic decisions and measures success from two formerly conflicting operations.
As the original workshop funding was concluding, the company had to plan its future. Why did it want to exist? The answer came from the new General Manager who, having had a breakdown after a successful career, landed on welfare. Getting back to work was not just getting a job; it was building the strength to get up every day; it was facing the question of failing yet again and suffering the embarrassment of starting over. It was having to ask for and accept help. Circumstances lead her to work at Pivotal giving her the dignity of working at a real business where she would not be judged or fired if she couldn’t face the day.
Without the dignity of work, many people drop out of the employment market, become ill, become dependent of family or agencies, fight the system and/or continue in a cycle of unemployment. Research indicates that work, to be beneficial to wellness, must be real. The need for Pivotal existed.
With no other funding option, Pivotal looked to its two large manufacturing customers and found a potential business niche. Using Minnesota Diversified Industries as the original inspiration, it founded the vision to build a company supporting a social mission from the profits of a company.
Incorporating the theory of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need, Pivotal realized people must progress through stages of development in order to succeed. They must have security of self, nutrition and housing before stability in employment can be expected. They need to develop trusting relationships and create the ability to deal with any issues that come before them in order to retain long-term sustainable careers.
