The Epiphany Guide to Social Enterprise

The red truck

In 2015, Kitti Murray bought a 1986 UPS delivery truck for $3,000, painted it red, outfitted it with an espresso machine, and parked it beside a disused service station at the corner of Market Street and East Ponce de Leon in Clarkston, Georgia. Murray was a freelance writer; her husband Bill was a pastor. Two years earlier they had moved to Clarkston, a town of about 13,000 that three decades of refugee resettlement had turned into what journalists like to call the most diverse square mile in America. More than half its residents were born in another country; the high school has counted students from more than fifty of them.

Murray had noticed two things about her new town. Newly arrived refugees badly needed first jobs, the kind that teach the unwritten rules of American work while paying a living wage. And Clarkston had nowhere to sit down over a decent cup of coffee. The red truck was her answer to both problems at once, and that at once is the whole idea this guide exists to explain. At Refuge Coffee Co., the coffee business is the program, not a fundraiser bolted onto a charity: every latte pays for the job training, and every shift delivers it. Since 2015 Refuge has trained 55 baristas from eighteen countries, keeps 10 to 15 trainees in paid full-time positions for a year or more each, and has grown from the truck to shops in Clarkston, Norcross, and Midtown, at 1280 Peachtree Street, steps from First Presbyterian's front doors.

Watch first: Refuge Coffee Co. on PBS's Secret Atlanta (3:58). Everything in this guide is easier to follow with this venture in mind.

Where Epiphany comes in

Refuge Coffee is not a case study borrowed from a textbook. When the company needed to grow, First Presbyterian's Epiphany grant jump-started the fundraising; the church's own Focal Point told that story in 2019, with members gathered around Murray to brainstorm funds for air conditioning, a bathroom renovation, and a second truck.

Epiphany itself began the way many good church ideas do: a member noticed something, and the something had a history. In 2010, Brian Jones, then minister of mission at Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota, designed a program called the Innové Project around three ingredients: a $250,000 pool, the untapped weekday expertise of his congregation, and finalists pitching a judges panel, Shark Tank style, because he wanted it to be fun. Innové funded eleven ventures, and Jones went on to found Innové Studios, a nonprofit that helps other churches build their own versions. First Presbyterian Church of Houston built one, Project Flourish, which awarded $240,000 to five ventures in early 2018. Ellen Adair Wyche, a First Presbyterian Atlanta member, learned of Houston's program and asked why her church couldn't do the same; with Jones's Innové Studios consulting on the design, and senior pastor Tony Sundermeier and executive pastor Rebekah LeMon behind it, Epiphany launched in the fall of 2018 (AJC, 2018). Wyche's one-line case for it still frames the program: the church had long been the implementer of its ministries; Epiphany would let it be the catalyst.

The first cycle drew 88 applications. Twenty-two became finalists. Church members with business experience, whom the program calls navigators, coached them through business planning; in February 2019 the finalists pitched a panel of judges, and five ventures received the first grants, among them PadSplit's home-sharing model for affordable housing, an automotive training center, an eviction-defense app, a senior-meals venture, and a coffee company in Clarkston.

Even the seed money had a story: a film crew paid the church $72,000 to use the sanctuary as a location, an anonymous donor added $30,000, and the congregation gave $150,000 more through a "Second Mile" line added to that year's pledge campaign. To date, Epiphany grants have totaled $455,000, and the alumni list runs from Peace of Thread to MicroLife to Special Kneads & Treats.

The program describes itself as an incubator and accelerator "for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to address social challenges," and runs in cycles that begin each fall. Applicants do not need to be Christian; proposals should further love, community, transformation, and servant leadership. Volunteers serve in three main ways: the screening team reads applications against the program's criteria, navigators mentor finalists through the coaching period, and judges hear the final pitches. Donors make the pool possible. Whatever your role, the job underneath is the same, and it is the reason for this guide.

Why this guide exists

A volunteer reading an application needs two postures at the same time: sympathy enough to take a young venture seriously, and scrutiny enough to take real money seriously. The season the program is named for is about recognition, the moment of seeing clearly what has been in front of you all along, and recognition is a fair description of the volunteer's craft: learning to see which ventures are what they appear to be.

What follows is the shortest honest tour we could write of a field that business schools have now studied for forty years: what a social enterprise actually is (section 2), why running one is structurally hard (3), what rigorous evidence says about what works (4 and 5), how to think about grants and impact investing (6), and a practical six-question screen you can apply to any application (7), worked through end to end on Refuge Coffee (8). Citations link to the reference list; the appendix carries the scholarly depth. You can be useful having read only sections 1, 2, and 7. The rest will be there when a hard case sends you looking.

What a social enterprise is, and what it is not

The term has a history worth thirty seconds. Bill Drayton founded Ashoka in 1980 to find and fund what he called social entrepreneurs, and spent the next decades making the label famous. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for microcredit, the field's first global celebrity idea. And in 1998 a Stanford (later Duke) professor named J. Gregory Dees wrote the essay that still anchors the definition, describing social entrepreneurs as change agents in the social sector, and warning, in a caveat usually dropped by people quoting him, that his definition was an ideal to aim at, not a description of any real organization.

Scholars have argued about the boundary ever since; the argument matters because where you draw the line decides what you fund. This guide uses the broad, workable consensus: a social enterprise leads with an explicit social or environmental mission, pursues it through a real business model, and works toward paying its own way instead of depending permanently on donations (Mair & Marti; Santos). One respected camp sets a much higher bar. Martin and Osberg would reserve the term for ventures that transform an unjust equilibrium into a stable better one, which would exclude much of what any local program funds. Know the strict bar exists; apply the broad one.

For Epiphany's purposes a single sentence does the work. A social enterprise earns enough to keep running, solves a clearly defined social or environmental problem, and builds protection for the mission into who decides what. The last clause is easy to skip and shouldn't be: a mission that lives only in a founder's heart has no protection when the founder gets tired, or bought out, or wrong.

These organizations sit on a spectrum. At one end, the wholly grant-funded nonprofit. Then the nonprofit that earns part of its budget by selling something (the field calls this trading). Further along, Yunus's "social business," where investors may recover their principal but never take a dividend. At the far end, the for-profit company with a mission wired into its operations. Refuge Coffee, a 501(c)(3) whose business activity is the program, sits in the productive middle. The model even has its own name in the research: a work-integration social enterprise, or WISE, a business whose real product is employment itself. Keep that term; it comes back in section 4, where it turns out to have the best evidence in the field.

Nearby things that are not social enterprises

Three neighbors cause most of the confusion. Creating shared value is Porter and Kramer's strategy for how large corporations can profit by addressing social needs; whatever its merits, and scholars dispute its win-win premise sharply (Crane et al.), it describes Nestlé, not your applicant. ESG investing screens portfolios; impact investing, which section 6 defines properly, is narrower and more demanding. And the legal labels: a benefit corporation is a status under state law, which in Georgia lets directors weigh a stated public benefit against pure shareholder interest (O.C.G.A. § 14-2-1806), while a Certified B Corp is a certification sold by a private nonprofit, B Lab. A company can be either, both, or neither, and none of it, by itself, makes anything a social enterprise. The screen in section 7 asks about substance, not labels.

One deep distinction underneath all of this, from Filipe Santos: commercial entrepreneurs concentrate on capturing value, keeping a defensible share of the wealth they create, while social entrepreneurs concentrate on creating it, and are content to let much of it spill over to people who never pay. Economists call the spillover a positive externality. That generosity is why these ventures deserve philanthropic capital, and it is also why they struggle: they are built to leak value on purpose.

Why it is hard: hybridity and mission drift

A social enterprise keeps two scoreboards: did we help the people we exist for, and did we earn enough to keep going. Scholars call this hybridity, and the central finding of a large literature is that the tension is permanent (Battilana & Lee). A healthy social enterprise never resolves it; it manages it, year after year, the way a marriage manages the household budget. When a founder tells you the tension is behind them, they have usually just stopped noticing which scoreboard is winning.

The characteristic failure has a name: mission drift. Drift almost never arrives as one bad decision. It accumulates through ordinary choices, each defensible alone: this customer pays better, that hire has more polish, this contract is bigger. Over time the organization bends toward whoever pays its bills and away from the beneficiaries it was built for (Doherty, Haugh & Lyon; Ebrahim, Battilana & Mair). By the time drift is visible in the mission statement, it has been true in the customer list for years. So here is a habit worth forming early: ask who the organization spent the past year listening to.

The good news is that drift is a governance problem, and governance can be built. Studies of work-integration enterprises in France, the same species as Refuge Coffee, found that durable hybrids do concrete, imitable things: they hire people who can carry both logics and socialize them into one culture rather than bolting a "social team" onto a "business team" (Battilana & Dorado). They keep social and commercial roles distinct but force them to meet in regular spaces of negotiation where trade-offs get argued openly (Battilana, Sengul, Pache & Model). And they couple whichever practices satisfy each constituency without letting either swallow the whole (Pache & Santos). A board that meets quarterly and signs the minutes is not mission protection. A board that hears from beneficiaries directly, tracks a social scorecard beside the financial one, and has the standing to lose an argument with the founder is.

The cautionary tale

Microfinance shows what happens when the incentives win. As lending institutions moved from nonprofit roots to commercial ownership through the 2000s, the commercially oriented ones made larger loans and reached fewer of the poorest borrowers (Cull, Demirgüç-Kunt & Morduch). The starkest chapter came in Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2010: sales pressure ahead of stock-market listings, including SKS Microfinance's IPO, helped push loans onto borrowers faster than they could bear, and the state's over-indebtedness crisis followed (Mader). None of this makes microcredit a fraud. It shows that a sound idea, run under the wrong ownership and weak governance, can hurt the very people it was invented to serve. That is why the screen in section 7 puts governance among the first-order questions.

What the evidence actually shows

The most useful development in this field over the past two decades is that people started testing things. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel in economics for bringing the randomized controlled trial, medicine's coin-flip method, to poverty programs; J-PAL, the MIT lab Banerjee and Duflo co-founded, now counts more than 2,300 randomized evaluations across 100 countries. The shift matters for a grant reviewer because it replaced arguing about programs in the abstract with testing them one at a time.

The method has limits worth knowing from the start. A trial reports an average effect that may describe no individual in the study, and a result from Kenya does not automatically carry to Clarkston (Deaton & Cartwright). RCTs are the best tool the field has for learning what works. They are not a promise that what worked there will work here.

The microcredit correction

Microcredit is the case where testing most changed the story, which is why every volunteer should know it. For thirty years the anecdotes were miraculous. Then six randomized evaluations, synthesized in 2015, found effects on the average borrower that were real but modest (Banerjee, Karlan & Zinman), and the landmark Hyderabad trial found that access to microloans raised business investment while leaving health, education, and women's empowerment unchanged (Banerjee, Duflo, Glennerster & Kinnan). A parallel critique argued the premise itself was romantic: most poor borrowers are entrepreneurs by necessity, not calling, and a stable wage job usually does more for a family than a small loan (Karnani). The lesson generalizes. Wherever anecdote has run far ahead of evidence, expect the correction to land on "modest," and respect ventures that claim modestly in the first place.

Two benchmarks every reviewer should carry

The first is cash. A randomized study of unconditional cash transfers in Kenya found that simply giving money to poor households raised consumption, assets, and well-being, with no detectable splurge on temptation goods (Haushofer & Shapiro). Cash is cheap to deliver and hard to beat, which makes it the natural floor: would this program do more good than handing its budget directly to the people it serves? Good applicants have done that arithmetic. A team that has never divided its annual budget by the number of people it serves has already told you something.

The second is the spread. GiveWell, the strictest comparison shop in philanthropy, currently estimates its top global-health programs save a life for roughly $3,000 to $5,500. No Atlanta venture will clear a bar set by malaria chemoprevention, and Epiphany isn't asking any to. The number to internalize is not the bar but the range behind it: among worthwhile programs, cost-effectiveness routinely differs by a factor of ten or a hundred. Comparing applicants to each other, rather than each to zero, is most of a screener's value.

The evidence closest to home

For Epiphany's kind of grantee, the most relevant research concerns employment social enterprises, the WISE model from section 2. REDF, the venture-philanthropy fund that KKR co-founder George Roberts started in 1997 (renamed Redefine Alliance in 2026), commissioned Mathematica to study workers at seven such enterprises. A year after starting, employment among participants had risen from 18 to 51 percent, monthly incomes had nearly tripled, stable housing had more than tripled, and every dollar the enterprises spent returned an estimated $2.23 in benefits to society, mostly through reduced public assistance and higher earnings (Rotz, Maxwell & Dunn). It is one study, partly observational, in one country; read it as encouraging rather than settled. Still, when you review a venture that hires its way to impact, as Refuge does, know that the model has a name, a literature, and results worth taking seriously.

One more frame belongs here. C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid argued that companies could profitably serve, and thereby lift, the world's poorest consumers. Karnani's counterargument, that the poor need stable jobs and public infrastructure more than they need to be marketed to, is the same argument he makes against microcredit. You will meet both spirits in applications: ventures that see the poor as customers, and ventures that see them as employees. Neither is automatically right; the evidence above is how you interrogate each.

What helps a venture succeed

Across the research, a few patterns separate ventures that hold together from ventures that wobble. They are where the questions in section 7 come from.

The sturdiest models are integrated: the business activity and the social good are the same act. Refuge sells coffee by employing trainees; the sale funds the mission and the work delivers it. Models where a side business bankrolls a separate charity can work, but they are structurally weaker, because the two halves compete for attention and capital (Doherty, Haugh & Lyon). Related: the model is most stable when the people who benefit also pay, or when a reliable third party pays specifically for delivered outcomes. Ask who pays, early and bluntly. A model whose payer is neither the beneficiary nor a committed funder is resting on hope.

Strong ventures also earn trust on two fronts at once, what the literature calls legitimacy: investors must believe the business works, and the community must believe the social claims are real (Wang & Zhou). And they test their assumptions instead of narrating them. The best causal evidence comes from ordinary startups, where a large study of A/B experimentation found that ventures which test systematically learn faster and perform better (Koning, Hasan & Chatterji); the lean-startup tradition has been adapted for social ventures, complete with a "minimum viable benefit" (Semcow & Morrison). A founder who has changed course because the evidence said so is a better bet than one who has only ever argued well.

Finally, sound ventures measure what their position in the causal chain lets them measure honestly (Ebrahim & Rangan). An early-stage program promising to demonstrate transformed lives is overpromising, and the overreach itself is a warning sign; counting placements, wages, and retention, and asking beneficiaries directly, is credible. On that last point, tools now exist so that "listen to beneficiaries" is a practice rather than a platitude: 60 Decibels runs short phone surveys in beneficiaries' own languages, and Listen4Good helps small nonprofits build feedback loops. An applicant does not need to use these tools, but "how do you hear from the people you serve?" should never draw a blank.

Grants, and money with a mission

Epiphany makes grants, but those grants live in a larger world of mission-minded capital. Volunteers who know that world read applications better; applicants arrive speaking its language.

Impact investing is the demanding end of that world. The term was coined at a Rockefeller Foundation gathering in Bellagio in 2007, and the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) defines it by intention and follow-through: investments made with the intent to generate positive, measurable social or environmental impact alongside a financial return, and actively managed toward that impact. The market is real money: the GIIN's most recent sizing put it at roughly $1.57 trillion across about 3,900 organizations, an estimate rather than a census. Adjacent to it sits patient capital, Jacqueline Novogratz's term at Acumen for philanthropic capital that accepts high risk and long horizons to build enterprises serving the poor; Acumen reports that for every dollar it has invested, it has gotten 91 cents back, which is either a poor return or a remarkable one, depending on whether you count the schools, the solar, and the ambulances.

A grant sits at the far, giving end of this spectrum of capital, and that position is a feature. A small grant can be catalytic: money that de-risks a venture enough for more cautious money to follow. Epiphany's own grants have worked this way; the one to Refuge Coffee seeded the larger fundraising that followed. The question a catalytic grant must answer is the single most important idea in this section.

Additionality: the one-question due diligence

Additionality is grantmaker's jargon for a plain thought: if this venture would do the same thing without our grant, the grant added no impact; it only paid a bill. The World Bank's evaluators define it as the contribution a funder makes that the market would not otherwise supply. In practice one question does most of the work: what, specifically, stalls if this grant does not arrive? A concrete, credible "the second truck waits a year" is additionality. A vague "it would extend our runway" is a bill. The test cuts both ways, though; do not reject a sound venture on the speculation that someone else would surely fund it. Ask what stalls, and listen for specifics.

For structuring the rest of your diligence, the field's most useful checklist is the Five Dimensions of Impact, developed by the Impact Management Project and now kept by Impact Frontiers: what outcome, for whom, how much, what the venture contributes beyond what would happen anyway, and what risk the impact doesn't materialize. A founder who can recite the five words but cannot say who specifically experiences the change, or how much of it, is reciting, not measuring.

Two cautions about numbers

First, measurement theater. SROI puts a dollar figure on social good and reports it as a ratio: every dollar invested is said to create so many dollars of social value. The method can discipline thinking, but every SROI number rests on judgment calls about what to count and how to price it; the critical literature is blunt that a value-judgment-free SROI does not exist (Nielsen, Lueg & van Liempd). Read an SROI as a structured story about what changed. Never let the ratio decide a grant.

Second, impact-washing, claiming impact that is not really there. In the GIIN's 2025 survey, 62 percent of investors named impact-washing the industry's leading challenge. The same survey asked respondents about their own results: 90 percent were satisfied with their impact performance, and when asked to rank themselves against peers, not one respondent believed their own impact was below average. Everyone is worried about the neighbors; no one is the neighbors. Which is why self-report is not evidence, and why the screen asks for answers that can be checked.

How to give well: the case for trust, after diligence

One more piece of research changes how generous funders behave. Nonprofits systematically underinvest in their own infrastructure because funders punish "overhead," and then funders cite the resulting fragility as reason to restrict funds further; Goggins Gregory and Howard named this the nonprofit starvation cycle, and it is the strongest argument for funding organizations rather than line items. The practice that grew from it, trust-based philanthropy, gives multi-year, flexible money and shifts the burden of proof to before the grant. The best evidence comes from the Ford Foundation's BUILD program, whose independent evaluation found grantees markedly more resilient; other large flexible funders, like Ballmer Group, practice the model at scale, though with less published evaluation. For Epiphany the lesson is a sequence: rigorous questions before the check, freedom after it. The six-question screen is built to be used that way.

The six-question screen

Epiphany already evaluates applications against five program criteria, set by the church:

The screen below is the analytical companion to those criteria: six questions, drawn from the research in sections 2 through 6, that turn "compelling idea" and "self-supporting" from impressions into findings. It is a structured aid to judgment, not a scoring formula. Use it in writing, before the money moves; a question a charismatic founder can pass verbally is not a screen unless a missing answer has a consequence. Two questions carry bright lines: if the answer is missing, the decision waits.

Two habits from any good grant process belong alongside it. If you know an applicant personally or professionally, say so early and step back from that decision. And treat what applicants share as confidential: they are handing strangers their finances and their dreams, and both deserve care.

And one closing question, in three parts, for the conversation rather than the form: what is the problem, why does this model beat the alternatives, and what evidence would change your mind? Teams that can answer the third part have thought about their own fallibility. Because humble-sounding answers are now a coached pitch move, test it: ask for the specific time they changed course because the evidence told them to. A real answer is a story with dates in it.

The screen, applied: Refuge Coffee

Here is what the screen looks like in use. The answers below draw only on the public record — Refuge's own site, the PBS film, the church's account of its grant — which is roughly what a screener has at intake. Where the record runs out, we say so, because knowing which questions remain open is most of the skill.

Even the program's anchor case — a venture Epiphany already funded and everyone loves — leaves real questions open: the revenue split, the placement numbers, the shape of the board. None of that counts against Refuge; intake done with respect still produces follow-ups. A screen that every beloved venture passed without them wouldn't be a screen.

One caution worth naming in the room: Refuge describes itself as values-driven but deliberately not faith-based; it prizes what it calls agendalessness toward the people it serves. Epiphany funds ventures like this on purpose. The program asks that the work itself embody its values, whatever the founders believe, and a coffee company in Clarkston manages that one shift at a time.

Serious but fragile

The honest summary of this field is that it is serious but fragile. Serious: forty years of scholarship, an evidence movement that won a Nobel, more than a trillion dollars of intentional capital, and local proof you can buy a latte from. Fragile: the hybrid tension never resolves, definitions stay contested, and impact is easiest to overstate for the people who most want it to be true. A volunteer who holds only one half of that summary will misjudge applicants in a predictable direction: the optimist funds good intentions, the skeptic funds nothing.

Holding both halves is the discipline, and it is an old one. The church has always known that generosity is a form of stewardship, that the gift is measured by whether it serves the person it names, and that discernment, the patience to ask the harder question first, is how love and rigor share one act. Fund clear theories of change. Prefer flexible money backed by real diligence. Treat metrics as aids, never verdicts. And remember why the care is worth it: the people on the other end of these grants, the trainee on her first shift, the family in the newly affordable room, are real, and so is the harm when generosity outruns judgment. Epiphany's wager is that a congregation full of businesspeople, lawyers, and engineers can be generous and careful in the same motion. This guide is for making good on it.

The scholarly depth, in nine pieces

Cases & local studies

Watch library

The anchor case — 4 min

PBS Secret Atlanta: Refuge Coffee Company. Watch, then walk the six-question screen against a real Atlanta venture.

The evidence on-ramp — 17 min

Esther Duflo, TED2010: how randomized trials tell us which development efforts help and which hurt. The spirit of section 4 in one talk.

An Atlanta founder on her model — 13 min

Jasmine Crowe-Houston at TEDNext 2024 on Goodr. Listen for outputs versus outcomes as she talks.

Patient capital — 18 min

Jacqueline Novogratz, TED2007: the case for philanthropic capital that accepts risk and long horizons. Section 6's spectrum of capital, made human.

The provocation — 19 min

Dan Pallotta, TED2013, on the overhead obsession. A fair warning: the talk overclaims in places and drew sharp published rebuttals; watch it with A8's starvation-cycle research in hand and argue with it. It is the best conversation-starter in the field for donors.

Two short explainers from Duke's CASE center round out the set, hosted on their site: Impact Explained (theory of change and logic models) and The 5 Dimensions of Impact. For a written introduction to when randomized evaluation is and isn't the right tool, J-PAL's Introduction to Randomized Evaluations is the standard reading.

Annotated reading path

1. Dees (1998), "The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship." The origin essay. Read it for the idealized definition and Dees's own warning that it describes a north star, not any real venture.
2. Defourny & Nyssens (2012), the EMES approach. Why the concept looks different in Europe than in America, so you never mistake a paradigm difference for a quality difference.
3. Yunus, Moingeon & Lehmann-Ortega (2010), "Building Social Business Models." The no-loss, no-dividend pole of the spectrum, in the founders' own theory.
4. Porter & Kramer (2011) with Crane et al. (2014). The shared-value proposal and its rebuttal, read as a pair: the best short course in how this field argues.
5. Doherty, Haugh & Lyon (2014), "Social Enterprises as Hybrid Organizations." The central managerial problem: mission, money, capital, and people held in tension at once.
6. Battilana, Sengul, Pache & Model (2015), "Harnessing Productive Tensions." The WISE study: social imprinting, its hidden cost, and spaces of negotiation. The closest research to Epiphany's anchor case.
7. Banerjee, Karlan & Zinman (2015) with Banerjee, Duflo, Glennerster & Kinnan (2015). The microcredit correction: the discipline of "modest, not transformative."
8. Haushofer & Shapiro (2016), the Kenya cash-transfer trial. Internalize the benchmark every program should have to beat.
9. Rotz, Maxwell & Dunn (2015), the Mathematica Jobs Study. The evidence for employment social enterprises: $2.23 returned per dollar spent, and the numbers behind it.
10. Deaton & Cartwright (2018), "Understanding and Misunderstanding RCTs." Take trial evidence seriously without mistaking it for portable proof.
11. Ebrahim & Rangan (2014), "What Impact?" Why what a venture should measure depends on where it sits in its causal chain. The antidote to grandiose measurement promises.
12. The toolkit, last: GIIN's Core Characteristics and market sizing, Impact Frontiers' Five Dimensions, the IFC Operating Principles, and Goggins Gregory & Howard (2009) on the starvation cycle. Frameworks land better once the concepts underneath them are yours.

Glossary

Social enterprise

An organization that earns enough to keep running while solving a defined social or environmental problem, with mission protection built into who decides what.

Trading

Earning revenue by selling goods or services rather than relying on donations.

Work-integration social enterprise (WISE)

A business whose core product is employment and training for people facing barriers to work. Refuge Coffee is one.

Hybridity

Running on two scoreboards at once, social impact and financial survival. The tension is permanent, not a phase.

Mission drift

A gradual slide toward commercial logic until the social purpose becomes secondary, accumulated through individually defensible choices.

Theory of change

The step-by-step causal story of how a venture's work turns into the outcome it promises.

Additionality

The contribution a funder makes that would not otherwise happen. If the venture would do the same thing without your grant, the grant paid a bill.

Impact investing

Investment intending positive, measurable social or environmental impact alongside financial return, actively managed toward it. Narrower than ESG.

Patient capital

Acumen's term: philanthropic, risk-tolerant capital with long horizons for enterprises serving the poor.

Catalytic capital

Concessionary money whose job is to de-risk a venture so more cautious capital will follow.

Spectrum of capital

The range from ordinary investment through responsible, sustainable, and impact investing to pure philanthropy. A grant sits at the giving end.

SROI

Social Return on Investment: a dollar ratio for social good. A disciplined narrative at best, never an objective score.

Impact-washing

Claiming impact that is not really there. Named the industry's leading challenge by 62% of investors in the GIIN's 2025 survey.

RCT

Randomized controlled trial: the coin-flip method used to test medicines, applied to social programs.

Better than cash

The benchmark question: would this program do more good than handing the same money directly to the same people?

Legitimacy

Being trusted on two fronts at once: that the business model is viable and that the social claims are real.

Creating shared value

A corporate strategy of generating business value by addressing social needs. Its win-win premise is academically disputed.

Trust-based philanthropy

Multi-year, flexible grants with lighter reporting after the grant and heavier diligence before it.

Benefit corporation

A legal status under state law (in Georgia, O.C.G.A. §§ 14-2-1801–1807) committing a company to a public benefit. Distinct from B Lab's private Certified B Corp label.

Navigator

An Epiphany volunteer who mentors finalist ventures through business planning during the coaching period.