The Return to Life Drug Rehabilitation Center is situated in a 400- square- meter white brick longhouse that once housed a kindergarten in the village of Ploske, Kirovohrad Oblast. Today it's a facility occupied by a suite of bedrooms, a kitchen, men's and women's bathrooms, a shower, class room, a makeshift gym, and TV room for the five women and eight men undergoing a comprehensive monthly "re-socialization" program. Also, five staff live on-site, but separately. Seventy percent of the Center's residents are HIV positive.
 The center is where 24 year-old Sasha Lyakhovets lives and works. A former drug addict and inflicted with HIV (via using dirty needles), Lyakhovets and three other Center residents make concrete paving blocks used mainly for sidewalks. They sell the blocks along with three other Center residents who are motivated to sell them; the incentive is to earn more money.
They operate and run a social enterprise on behalf of the rehab center - a new phenomenon in the business world that unites commerce and the social sphere, in this case employing disadvantaged people while teaching them vocational and small business skills.
Profits also are used to cover room and board for two residents at the Center (Hr 1,500 UAH per month, or $300) and are being saved for the future purchase of a truck so that they could make deliveries on orders and, transport firewood seven kilometers from the forest as well. Currently, the Center pays an outside supplier for the firewood it requires.
"This is why we started this business," says the Center's director, Oleksandr Ostapov, "to eventually wean ourselves away from government and donor funding." This kind of social entrepreneurship venture is what experts call an "affirmative business" or a venture created specifically to provide permanent jobs, competitive wages, career tracks and ownership opportunities for disadvantaged or vulnerable social groups of people.
 The majority of Ukraine's social entrepreneurship ventures (there are 34 known social enterprises) employ the target group they service directly in their businesses. They pursue the same goals as any other business while the ultimate goal still remains the same: simultaneously pursuing financial and social returns on investments, which is the ultimate benchmark of business success.
For example, the Lviv-based - "Oselya" organization - provides shelter to the homeless while engaging them in restoring old furniture that is either auctioned off (if the piece was donated) or sold for a fee to individual clients. The money is reinvested into supporting the shelter while paying the craftsmen for their work. In Luhansk, a group of young HIV positive women are employed as seamstresses and tailors crafting garments to custom orders. The social impact here is having gainful work in a society that stigmatizes and discriminates against them.
And in Kyiv, the Bulgakov Museum sells gourmet tea on a terrace adjacent to its building along Andriyivskiy Descent earning money that it uses to renovate the museum's interior and restore archived items from the Bulgakov family collection.
The field of pursuing a "double" bottom line is relatively new and transforming the way people look at running a business. The change has been so fast that practitioners and academics alike have yet to reach a consensus to define it.
 The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concept of micro-credit to entrepreneurs (usually to women since they are found to be more responsible with money) too poor to qualify for bank loans likens social entrepreneurs to "change makers" since they contribute to improving not only society but also the economy as a whole.
Indeed, when this happens, new markets, opportunities and prospects emerge. In Lviv, the Tree of Life NGO, which provides services to the hearing impaired, has partnered with a business to produce high quality, demand-driven audio books. As a result, they created a niche market and have already financed the publication of three new books from previous sales. Besides selling them at various book shops in Lviv and at local markets, the organization donates audio files and books to every oblast library for the deaf and to Kateryna Yushchenko's 3000 Fund.
The multiplier effects transpiring when the two spheres converge could eventually revolutionize business structures. The business-social divide that has existed ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution could conceivably be bridged.
The premise is these two vital areas should not be forever separate. The reasoning is that the private sector will continue progressing exponentially while the social sphere will be left behind, leaving disparities in its tracks. In other words, if social entrepreneurship was institutionalized as a valid business model, people would then broadly use entrepreneurial skills to solve social problems en masse.
In Ukraine the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) began funding such projects in 2003 because they liked the idea of supporting a sustainable activity, going beyond "one-off" funding to creating systemic change. This is the reason AmCham partnered with the Ukraine Citizen Action Network (UCAN) on a matching fund basis to promote social entrepreneurship among non-profits.
"We soon realized that non-profits who adopt business models in their activities expand their impact while simultaneously increasing their financial self-sufficiency, which is why we've co-funded 21 enterprises to date," said UCAN director Barbara Felitti . According to UCAN statistics, the 15 completed businesses that have already finished their projects have created over 50 full-time and 25 part-time jobs earning a total of $45,000 in the span of one year.
However the "merging of the sectors", as Bill Drayton of the Ashoka Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship refers to it, isn't always a peaceful marriage. Although social entrepreneurships often accelerate change and become pace setters in a burgeoning business field, they must innovate and anticipate change to survive because of their double bottom lines. Since a social service is always provided, image and brand management is doubly important as reputations could be as easily lost as fast as they are gained.
It seems Ukraine is ripe for a social entrepreneurship explosion. According to Drayton, democracy and social entrepreneurship are mutually supportive since both are about citizens exercising power, and institutionalizing decentralized power. One could argue that as Ukraine continues reforming and fine tuning its budding democracy, more social enterprises will spring up in tandem. Drayton noticed that places like China and Russia show no signs of social entrepreneurial development.
There are three basic forms of social entrepreneurship in Ukraine:
- When NGOs charge for fees within their prime area of activity;
- A non-profit that starts its own enterprise with a share of income being redirected back into the NGO's programs;
- Or a "People with Disabilities Enterprise" (Ukraine is one of the few in the world who endorse this type of business) whereby the company pays zero tax on profit if it has more than 50 percent of its employees consisting of people with disabilities.
Naturally, Ukrainian business legislation regulates each type of business operation and improvements are required to fully take advantage of social enterprise endeavors. For example, an NGO that does cost recovery through fees must re-invest the money earned back into the organization within the fiscal year. Today, individuals registered as "private entrepreneurs" are subject to a fixed quarterly tax rate ranging from 90-250 UAH depending on the business activity - a plausible option in the current business environment.
Still, according to a study in 2006 by Intron, a Donetsk-based consulting company, many Ukrainian social enterprises lack clearly defined marketing strategies, sophisticated pricing systems and policies, awareness of market needs and of their competitors.
So while local social entrepreneurships are still learning how to speak this new business language, many academic institutions like Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Oxford, among others, are looking to capitalize on this new business paradigm, pointing to currently existing institutions that are no longer sustainable for society. They look upon the business-social bridge as the answer to solving many of society's problems, a reason why enrollment in social enterprise management is up at all of the aforementioned universities.
In Ukraine, rather than being an academic exercise, social entrepreneurship is being implemented at the practical level and clearly demonstrating how simple ideas may make a big impact.
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