LEAD 4043 Module 1 Social Entrepreneur Profile Example

Baking to Hire: A Profile of Greyston Bakery and the Social Entrepreneurship of Open Hiring

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD4043: Social Entrepreneurship in Business

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

I supervise housekeeping and laundry operations for a hotel in downtown Denver, and over the past few years I have hired several people who struggled to find work anywhere else, including women recently released from prison. Some became our most reliable employees. That experience led me to an idea for a business of my own, which later modules will develop. This first paper studies an enterprise that built its entire model around employing people others turn away: Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York. The paper defines social entrepreneurship, describes the problem the founder set out to address and the model the bakery uses, examines how it earns revenue and is structured, evaluates the change it has produced and considers what a new social entrepreneur can learn from it.

What Social Entrepreneurship Means

Definitions vary, but most share two elements: a primary aim of creating social value and the use of entrepreneurial methods to pursue it. One widely cited review described social entrepreneurship as a process of combining resources in new ways to pursue opportunities that catalyze social change or address social needs (Mair & Martí, 2006). Austin et al. (2006) compared social and commercial entrepreneurship and found that the two differ in their mission, in how they mobilize people and money and in how they measure performance, since a social venture must show impact as well as financial survival. These ideas provide a lens for examining Greyston: what social need it addresses, what resources it combines and how it measures its results.

The Founder and the Problem

Greyston Bakery was founded in 1982 by Bernie Glassman, an aerospace engineer turned Zen teacher, together with members of his meditation community. Glassman saw that many people in the low-income neighborhoods of southwest Yonkers were cut off from steady work by histories of incarceration, addiction, homelessness or long unemployment. Conventional hiring processes, with résumés, interviews and background checks, screened such people out before they could prove themselves. Glassman's view was that a business could be designed to remove those barriers and that the jobs it created could support wider community services. In this sense, the bakery began not with a product but with a problem.

The Open Hiring Model

Greyston's best-known innovation is open hiring. Anyone who wants an entry-level job can add their name to a list, and when a position opens, the next person on the list is offered it, without a résumé, an interview or a background check. New employees go through an apprenticeship period, during which they receive training and support with challenges such as transportation, housing and child care, and those who complete it can move into permanent roles and promotions. The model reverses the usual order of hiring: instead of proving they deserve a job before getting one, people get the job and then prove themselves in it. The approach turns a social mission into a daily operating practice, not a side program.

How the Bakery Earns Its Revenue

Greyston is a commercial business that must sell enough to survive. Its largest and longest-standing customer is Ben & Jerry's, which has used Greyston brownies in its ice cream for decades; the bakery also sells brownies and baked goods to other food companies and directly to consumers. This revenue model is what makes the mission sustainable: the jobs exist because the bakery has paying customers who want a quality product. The bakery's profits have historically supported the Greyston Foundation, a nonprofit that has run community programs in housing, child care, health services and workforce development. The pairing of a for-profit bakery with a nonprofit foundation is an example of a hybrid arrangement, combining market income with social purpose.

Legal Structure

In 2012, Greyston registered as a benefit corporation under New York's then-new benefit corporation law. A benefit corporation is a for-profit company whose charter commits it to pursue a general public benefit alongside profit and to report on its social and environmental performance. Hiller (2013) explained that this form gives directors legal room to consider stakeholders other than shareholders, a protection that a conventional corporation's directors may not have. For Greyston, the form wrote into law what the company had practiced for thirty years and offered some protection against pressure to abandon open hiring if ownership or leadership changed.

Classifying the Entrepreneur

Zahra et al. (2009) proposed three types of social entrepreneurs. Social bricoleurs address local needs with local knowledge and resources; social constructionists build ventures that fill gaps left by existing institutions and can be scaled; and social engineers try to change whole social systems. Glassman began as a bricoleur, responding to needs in his own neighborhood with the people and skills at hand. Over time, Greyston moved toward the constructionist and even engineer types, as it set out to share open hiring with other employers and to change how companies think about hiring risk. This progression suggests that the type of a social entrepreneur is not fixed and that local ventures can grow into broader movements.

Economic and Social Change

Greyston's economic contribution is concrete: wages and benefits for workers who might otherwise have been unemployed, a stable manufacturer in a city that lost many industrial jobs and tax revenue and spending that circulate in the local economy. Its social contribution is harder to measure but significant: work experience, references and income for people whose records closed other doors, along with the support services that help them keep a job. Its broader contribution is an idea. By demonstrating that a business can hire without screening and still meet the quality standards of a demanding customer, Greyston challenges an assumption that many employers never question.

Tensions and Limits

Greyston also illustrates the tensions social enterprises face. Open hiring brings some higher turnover and training costs that a conventional competitor does not bear, and the bakery must remain cost-competitive with commercial bakeries. Dependence on one large customer creates concentration risk. Measuring social impact in a way that persuades funders and customers is difficult, as Austin et al. (2006) noted for social ventures generally. These tensions do not undermine the model, but they show that a social mission adds work to a business rather than replacing the ordinary demands of quality, price and reliability.

Lessons for My Own Venture

Three lessons stand out. First, the mission must be built into the operating model; at Greyston, hiring is the mission. Second, the product must be good enough to win customers on its own merits, since goodwill alone does not sustain a business. Third, support services matter as much as the job itself, because people facing barriers need help with the problems that threaten their employment. These lessons will shape the venture I explore in this course: a commercial laundry in Denver serving hotels and clinics and employing women returning from incarceration.

Conclusion

Greyston Bakery shows social entrepreneurship in practice. Its founder identified a problem that conventional hiring ignored, designed a business model in which addressing that problem was the core activity, built revenue on a quality product and adopted a legal structure that protects the mission. Its growth from a local response to a model shared with other employers illustrates how social ventures can spread change. Module 2 analyzes the problem my own venture would address and the opportunity within it.

References

Austin, J., Stevenson, H., & Wei-Skillern, J. (2006). Social and commercial entrepreneurship: Same, different, or both? Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 30(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6520.2006.00107.x

Hiller, J. S. (2013). The benefit corporation and corporate social responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 118(2), 287-301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1580-3

Mair, J., & Martí, I. (2006). Social entrepreneurship research: A source of explanation, prediction, and delight. Journal of World Business, 41(1), 36-44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2005.09.002

Zahra, S. A., Gedajlovic, E., Neubaum, D. O., & Shulman, J. M. (2009). A typology of social entrepreneurs: Motives, search processes and ethical challenges. Journal of Business Venturing, 24(5), 519-532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2008.04.007