How Maria Kim and REDF Are Building Career Pathways Across the United States

Newsweek

3 days ago

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Maria Kim started her career in insurance, moving up the ranks but finding herself unfulfilled despite her success. She mentioned the September 11, 2001, attacks as a moment when her philosophy around work and career changed. She noted a similar shock occurring in the workforce since the COVID-19 pandemic.
"If this is how fragile our world is, am I really walking in my vocation?" Kim told Newsweek about her feelings at the time she made a career pivot. "Obviously, we all were mourning what was happening in our country. It was also professional shock ... so I did a little soul searching."
She started working for Cara Collective, an organization that supported career opportunities for people who have served time in the justice system.
"We had a couple businesses that helped folks build their skills, their confidence, their moxie and ultimately get placed in private sector jobs where they continued their economic mobility," she explained.
Kim attended business school at the University of Chicago, saying she was one of two people in her class interested in nonprofit work at the time. Her first contact with REDF (Roberts Enterprise Development Fund) was with Cara Collective as a grantee of its investment program. Today, she's the CEO of REDF, a social enterprise accelerator founded by George Roberts, the finance-industry veteran who co-founded the well-known investment firm KKR.
"Social enterprises are businesses that exist not just to offer some type of good or service, but to create jobs and something we call economic power for folks overcoming tough barriers to employment," Kim said. "Those barriers could include homelessness, impact of the justice system, or often a combination of the two."
In addition to financial support, social enterprises benefit from the business acumen within REDF, including leaders like Kim, access to strategic templates and advice on how to scale operations to make the biggest impact.
"We want to help all of these businesses have double-bottom-line impact, not just produce a profit that they can reinvest in their mission, but produce social impact that can scale," Kim said. She added that she's seen a rise in business students interested in working at places with a social mission, an assertion backed by survey data over the last year. REDF has started an MBA fellowship program to help business students familiarize themselves with nonprofit operations.
"We're not just coaches for these enterprises. We're consultants, too, and that consultancy is targeted towards the attributes of the business that make it more financially sustainable, but also the attributes of the organization that help them to provide the support of services for the employees so that they can continue to grow their impact," Kim said.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Canva
From her post, Kim detests the notion that, as a nonprofit CEO, she's not running her company with strong business principles, or with an eye for growth.
"Nonprofit is merely a tax status. It is not a state of being, so screw all y'all that think that the nonprofit industry is not a business industry," Kim said. "It certainly is. We just happen to reinvest our dividends in a different way."
In the interest of considering job candidates whose personal experiences present barriers to employment, Kim points to a few details around "why barriers happen in the first place," including the higher rate of crime convictions for racial minorities, particularly for non-violent offenses, or the fact that some people choose homelessness over abusive living situations, and may lose their hourly job in the process.
"Our argument is you all are missing out. There is a large talent pool that is crushing it in these businesses that could use another opportunity at an increasingly more economically mobile job in the future," Kim said. REDF and their partners are working to "redefine how this country thinks about what talent looks and feels like, or who or what is worthy of investment."
She pointed to some of the organizations currently partnered with REDF, which are receiving financial and strategic support and continuing their mission of helping people find jobs, such as the Center for Employment Opportunities, which is serving 8,000 people coming out of incarceration per year and hiring them into maintenance and neighborhood beautification roles. Rise Up Industries in San Diego is another, which teaches computer numerical control (CNC) skills to individuals who were formerly incarcerated or gang-involved so they can pursue careers as CNC machine operators in manufacturing. Coalfield Development is helping people experiencing barriers to employment in the Appalachian region to train for modern jobs, while The Challenge Program in Delaware is providing job opportunities for young people through furniture building.
"The REDF portfolio has generated over $3.1 billion dollars in earned revenue," Kim said. "But the more important metric is that collectively, they've employed over 157,000 people all around the country."
The employment figures imply that 157,000 families are impacted, either by improved living conditions or better future prospects as a result of their parents' or spouses' employment. But Kim notes that it's not just a job that people are worthy of; it is a job with upward opportunity. So REDF tracks mobility as well.
"We can track the economic mobility [by] their reduction in reliance on government benefits, which is around 66 percent," Kim said. "And we can track their transition from insecurity to housing stability, which has risen 253 percent."
Sometimes companies don't even know they have embedded a social aspect to their business, Kim said, which can open them up to more resources, either through government support or organizations like REDF. She pointed to the example of a sneaker company that was actively hiring formerly incarcerated individuals, but did not even know that it could qualify for tax benefits and other opportunities.
With instability hitting businesses of all kinds due to global political instability, Kim also shared that REDF has identified a few core areas of focus so that it doesn't feel a need to cover the world with social employment enterprise solutions. As of now, the organization is focused on Los Angeles, where it is headquartered, the Chicago area, and Appalachia, three parts of the United States with diverse communities and significant need for innovation in social enterprise.
"We want to help the businesses here who've been around for a minute really level up, such that they can be contract ready for these types of opportunities," Kim said, of the growth and attention coming to LA and Chicago with a World Cup, Olympics and other major events on the way. "We don't want to let those big positive demand shocks pass us by, so, that's kind of a micro experiment. We want to do the work of codifying employment social enterprise into state law."
In Appalachia, REDF is working to build financial incentives for existing employers to develop more inclusive hiring and promotion practices or reshape business models to adapt to modern times.
"We want to incentivize a certain amount of capacity among large companies, small businesses, traditional employers to go employment social enterprise," Kim said. "To convert their practices increasingly towards inclusive employment."
Newsweek is set to host its inaugural Women's Global Impact forum. The August 5 event, hosted at Newsweek's headquarters in New York City, will bring together some of the world's top female executives and connect them with rising stars across industries and job functions.
For more information on the event and entry guidelines, please visit the Women's Global Impact homepage.