The SEA - STL is proud to feature one of its member organizations engaged in social enterprise. Read about ProvidentCare below, or click on the logo to visit their website.

Provident's ProvidentCare

Provident, Inc. was founded in St. Louis in 1860, and works toward the mission of strengthening low-income families, providing underserved youth opportunities and resources to succeed, and assisting communities to become stable and productive. Provident has been using social entrepreneurship in its programs and services since 1979 when it sold its first contract to an employer for Employee Assistance Program services. Since then we've provided behavioral health services to an HMO and case management to customers of an electric utility company. We collaborated with 8 other agencies to create a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) to meet the needs of children in residential placement. Beginning in 2000, Provident launched its first home care company with the objective of providing profits to support the agency's "charitable" operations.

Our definition of social entrepreneurship is the incorporation of earned income as another revenue source to support our mission. Earned income strategies in social service nonprofits are by our definition entrepreneurial since agencies tend to be too willing to rely solely on the generosity of donors and the largess of government to fund their work. We view social entrepreneurship as a method for regaining some control over a nonprofit's mission and a way to craft an economic model that may be more likely to be sustainable.

ProvidentCare, Inc., (founded as At Ease Home Care in 2000 and rebranded in 2005 to align the company more closely with its not-for-profit parent) was Provident's first step outside of its then-current skill set into non-medical home care services for the private pay and Medicaid markets. It is also our first experience with a for-profit subsidiary. The primary objective of this company was to produce profits for other parts of the agency. As we learned, it is much more difficult to start a business when you don't have experience with the type of work or the population served to draw on. It took longer to become profitable than any of us had imagined - 6 years - which put great pressure on the staff and board to hang in during unprofitable times.

In 2006, ProvidentCare served100 clients with about 70,000 hours of service. Our service area is St. Louis City, St. Louis County and Franklin County in Missouri. We have two full-time managers and a part-time support person. Administrative leadership is provided by a Provident manager.

We scaled back to a lean operation in 2006, eliminating the cost of a sales position, which the company had difficulty supporting. Our objective is to maintain our current referral relationships, maintain the quality of service being delivered, and hire the best quality providers available. Our debt load is gradually being decreased. When we have fulfilled our obligations to the bank, we'll take a hard look at what the future direction of the company will be.

One of the organizational benefits we've experienced is learning about the issues and challenges of aging-in-place. We are taking that knowledge and coupling it with other services at Provident to create new business models for future services to similar populations.