“Failing Fearlessly at TWB” Part II: Social Impact

In our last newsletter, we left off our conversation on failures that have transformed into learning opportunities when it comes to bakery operations - or the enterprise-side of The Women’s Bakery. This month, we will delve into the social side of our social enterprise. At The Women’s Bakery, we call this social impact. In our presentations and social media, we often refer to this concept of social impact as “Whole Woman Programming”. Some examples of our Whole Woman Programming includes providing breakfast for all of our #StrongWomenBakingBread at the start of their shifts, conducting financial literacy trainings throughout the year, coordinating Iranzi clinic women’s health screenings, and providing mental health counseling services on a monthly basis. 

While examples of Whole Woman Programming are easy to understand in terms of creating a holistic work environment for our #StrongWomen, defining social impact does not come as easily. This brings us to our first social impact failure - not defining social impact early on -  which has brought on some unique challenges in terms of sharing what we do with the broader community. At the most basic level, one might assume that social impact at The Women’s Bakery can be defined as creating some sort of social change for our employees and for the community.

Though this is not completely off, when we get into reporting on data-backed social impact with our partners and community, simply stating that “positive change” has occurred is not enough. First, we must define where social impact fits into the company. We thankfully have a a team of #StrongWomen leading our social impact team. This team oversees our Whole Woman Programming. However, the challenge of balancing our priorities in terms of bakery operations and social impact remains. Being a social enterprise, advancement in both arenas is equally important - and in fact - they share a symbiotic relationship. 

More specifically, we believe that through our Whole Woman Programming, women truly are holistically improving their general quality of life and in turn their performance at work. On the flipside, when work performance goes up - the whole company grows and uplifts the community in which it resides. As the business grows, we can reinvest more funds into our social impact programming. 

While our social impact model makes sense, we are still faced by the challenge defining “social impact” more clearly. In other words, what does social impact mean for different audiences at The Women’s Bakery? The social needs of bakers differ from those of the management team; the needs of working mothers differ in each of the cities in which we work. 

And this is where we have grown in the last five years: 

In the early days of The Women’s Bakery, we were met by the question - “What are you trying to prove?” This guided our early social impact strategy to focus on just the woman bakers. This detracted from the question of - “What is TWB doing to create positive, lasting social impact?” - and ultimately caused reason to worry about mission drift. Social impact is more than just statistics about the number of women we have gainfully employed or the number of children served through The One Bread Project, our school feeding program. Ultimately, this brought us to ask the questions of “What are we measuring?” and “Why are we measuring it in the way that we are?” 

These questions have guided us toward looking at what social impact means, both as a company and how social impact is defined for different levels within the company in authentic, meaningful ways. 

For example, a need was identified to create direct access to mental health services for the woman bakers, whereas for the team in the U.S., a self-directed wellness stipend was more appropriate. 

Situating social impact at The Women’s Bakery has certainly come a long way from the start of our social enterprise. While our lack of clarity in defining social impact may be viewed as a failure by some - including early funders and team members - it has equipped us with the tools to be asking the right questions in terms of how we are currently defining and measuring impact now and for whom.