Our Model

The Unlocking Communities social enterprise model of economic, social, and environmental transformation is three pronged, involving community-based entrepreneurship development, product supply chains, and global franchising to serve local needs. Our approach hinges on addressing pressing community issues, beginning with access to clean water and cooking stoves. By bringing together community leaders, training opportunities, resources and new financing models that all drive local development, Unlocking Communities creates ecosystems responsive to community needs while developing pathways to self-sufficiency that ensure communities can reshape their local economies to benefit all.

To drive the creation of new markets in developing communities where none yet exist, we focus on the local community first. We build relationships with local partners who can identify community members who have deep social networks, then provide them with entrepreneurship training and tools to run small businesses. As part of this training, Unlocking Communities provides entrepreneurs with an initial product inventory. Partnerships with local suppliers ensure these entrepreneurs have a pipeline of products to sell as part of their training. 

Select community based entrepreneurs want to develop local businesses, and Unlocking Communities supports these individuals by providing business plan incubation resources and access to capital. Unlocking Communities has supported more than 50 people who have developed strong local business plans to date, including plantain farms, chicken farms, seed banks and pharmacies.  

Ensuring sustainability of our work is important to us, and we focus on sustainability at three levels:

  1. Small business sustainability: Ensure each group of entrepreneurs who sell products is running a business that yields a return on their investment that can endure for years to come.
  2. Sustainable markets for products: A factory producing products for community sales and use in Haiti is sustainable because of local demand.
  3. Financial sustainability: Globally, we are working toward sustainability with franchising fees paid by each country that we enter into, carbon credit financing, and traditional philanthropy.