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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 25, 2013)
Street roots Oct. 25, 2013 lights the A new type o f business doing good in Portland BY NATHAN GILLES S T A F F W R IT E R he building is striking. Several stories tall and stretching roughly two city blocks, the metal-framed factory’s roof is covered with 4,830 navy blue solar panels. This 850-kilowatt array is the largest of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. But that’s not what makes this place unique. The nonprofit Portland Habilitation Center Northwest (PHC Northwest) runs the facility on NE Airport Way through a job program with a special purpose. “The goal is to provide a career path for those with disabilities,” says Massoud Mollaghaffari, General Manager for PHC Northwest’s industrial division. Mollaghaffari is part of an organization that currently employs about 500 people with disabilities — Portland-area residents, many at union wages, with benefits and P H O TO S C O U R TE S Y OF PHC N O R T H W E S T pension programs — in businesses ranging Top, the sun rises over solar rooftop panels at PH C Northwest. Above, PH C General Manager from the manufacturing of high-tech lighting Massoud Mollaghaffari. to janitorial and landscaping. PHC Northwest is a part of a new breed of business ventures. Called social enterprises, these are for Cindy, working for Nike — they both former students have launched their own profit and nonprofit endeavors that harness independently discovered social enterprise. ventures including My Street Grocery, a for- the market to do good. And PHC Northwest They met in graduate school and later profit, mobile grocery cart that feeds low- isn’t the only Portland area group leveraging started a business that they still run that income Portlanders. (“On the Streets: A capitalism for the better. helps instructors in Guatemala earn a living New Kind of Food Cart,” Street Roots, Oct The city already has a handful of social wage through teaching Spanish to 2012). enterprises from a nonprofit community Americans over video chat. Cooper says social enterprises come in grocery store (“Making Portland’s Complex Clay Cooper says selling quality products many forms, from nonprofits to for-profits, Food Deserts Grow Green,” Street Roots, is just as important for a social enterprise’s including for-profit businesses — like Ben & Dec 2011) to programs like those run by the Jerry’s Ice Cream - that partner with success as its mission. nonprofit Central City Concern (CCC). “Sometimes social enterprise doesn’t nonprofits. She says what form a social Along with offering housing to homeless and enterprise ultimately takes depends on its always deliver,” says Cooper. “Sometimes low-income Portlanders, CCC also runs a they don’t put quality first; they put the goal and its strategy for leveraging the number of social enterprises that allow its mission first.” market. clients to earn decent wages and receive job Quality is something PHC Northwest has For CCC’s new venture, that means training. The organization is now expanding realized it also needs to push. remaining a nonprofit while roasting high- its social enterprise arm by launching a “A lot of it is about giving people the class coffee. coffee roasting business. Happy Cup Coffee opportunity to try things,” says PHC “We went into this social enterprise with Company is trying something similar to Northwest President John Murphy. “But the mindset that we wanted to sell a high benefit disabled Portlanders. quality coffee,” says Clay Cooper, Director of we’re not dealing in cheap currency. If they “A lot of times the idea of addressing a [employees] are not making it, we need to Social Enterprises and Employment social problem through a market-based be very objective.” Services at CCC. solution or a venture is surprising,” says In order to be successful, Murphy says, Cooper is helping launch the coffee- Cindy Cooper, Portland State University PHC Northwest occasionally has had to let roasting program, which is currently being instructor in social enterprise. Surprising or people go. It’s also had to strategically plan sold in all 12 New Seasons Market stores no, she says, it’s effective. what it makes. under the brand Central City Coffee. So far Cooper is the co-founder and director of In the mid-2000s, Murphy and it only has one employee, but Cooper Impact Entrepreneurs and the related Social anticipates that as sales grow so will the Mollaghaffari - who’s an engineer and runs Innovation Incubator. Associated with PSU s number of employees. the R&D team — were asked by PHC business school, Cooper’s programs include Northwest’s board to create a new Clay Cooper is the husband of Cindy study-aboard trips to India and courses manufacturing program. At the time, solar Cooper. After becoming disillusioned with where students can examine social panels looked promising. However, Murphy their former jobs - Clay, a bond trader; enterprise in action. Several of Cooper s T 7 says, it was quickly obvious China had cornered the market. Panels were out. But investigating them led to PHC Northwest’s innovative, rooftop solar array. It also guided Murphy and Mollaghaffari to another eco-friendly technology: a lighting source called light emitting diodes, or LEDs. LEDs aren’t light bulbs. They’re semiconductors like solar panels, transistors, and other solid-state technologies. LEDs can be tiny — about 3 mm thick and about as tall — but they’re far superior to conventional lights: lasting longer, using less energy, and shining clearer and brighter than incandescent, fluorescent, or halogen bulbs. LEDs also outshine other industrial lighting, including high-pressure sodium streetlights. Mollaghaffari says LEDs offered PHC Northwest a unique business opportunity, one based on quality design. LEDs aren’t just screwed in like . conventional bulbs. Instead they’re fully integrated into their lamps via circuit boards. Many previous designs weren’t great at synching LEDs with their boards. Failures resulted. Like other semiconductors, LEDs also get hot — really hot. Many previous designs didn’t compensate and lamps burnt out. PHC Northwest found its niche by overcoming others’ failures. Under the solar roof, just past the factory doors, there’s a wall covered in LED lamps, all sold under the brand Beyond Limitations Lighting. They’re sleek, modern, and formed from gleaming aluminum. They range from indoor and outdoor to ceiling and wall-mounted lights and desk lamps. Many utilize the same characteristic rigged fan-shaped designs: a solution to overheating. Each lamp is fully integrated with a circuit board that’s been tested and designed by Mollaghaffari and his team. The lamps are also tested to maximize their luminosity. “Some companies just sell lights,” says Mollaghaffari, “we sell illumination.” PHC Northwest’s lamps can be found at the Olympic Village in Vancouver, British Columbia, the Oregon Governor’s Mansion, the Qatar airport, and several Ontario gymnasiums (where their crisp light is used for filming sporting events in HD), to name a few. This year, Beyond Limitations Lighting also won the Most Innovative Product award at the Portland Lights Trade Show for a desk lamp called Slices, a cylindrical-bodied lamp that unfolds in connected sections, or slices, spreading light as needed. The accolade is well deserved; it looks like the brainchild of Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive. LED lamps aren’t the only product made in the facility. PHC Northwest employees also manufacture protective equipment for radioactive submarines. They make shoe soles, and package shoelaces and food containers. They do specialty embroidery. They fold laundry for Portland Public Schools. And they warehouse items and products for other companies: huge reams of paper for a local printer, toiletries for a local organic soap company, and documents for the Forest Service. And the company also runs a very successful janitorial and landscaping business that together employ about 400 people. Mollaghaffari says all this activity illustrates PHC N orthw est’s philosophy. “The concentration is not what disabilities [employees] have but what we can do to put their abilities to work,” says Mollaghaffari. As to why people pursue social enterprise, Clay Cooper has some thoughts. “Making more money isn’t necessarily going to make you happy,” he says. “It’s about helping people, or wildlife, or fighting global warming. I think people are starting to think in more creative ways to incorporate business into that.”
