What Greyston has tried to do is take a middle road, building businesses designed to throw off money to the foundation and also to create jobs for its clients. That nontraditional approach calls for novel thinking. "With all due respect to academics, I don't need another think tank or another consultant," Lief says. What he does need -- and has an uncanny ability to find -- are business partners who can endow Greyston with the kinds of knowledge and long-term support that are far more valuable than any onetime corporate donation. "In our case partners helped us get bigger faster," Lief says. Lief "is a builder and a stabilizer," says Rose. "He has expanded Greyston's collaborative relationships and grown Greyston in an organized and methodical way."
Both the bakery and the affordable-housing units have progressed as far as they have only by dint of Lief's ability to find and manage the right business partners. The bakery attributes 70% of its $3.5 million in revenues to the brownies it makes for Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., the $209-million ice-cream maker in South Burlington, Vt. "In the beginning, we were just a vendor, and their involvement was limited to cheerleading for our social mission," Lief says. Now, however, the relationship is more complex.
Lief and his team have worked closely with Ben & Jerry's -- improving efficiency, cutting costs, and modifying production methods to boost quality -- for more than a decade. In the early days, if botched batches of brownies arrived, the ice-cream maker gave Greyston the chance to correct the problem without threatening to drop it as a supplier -- just for the sake of supporting Greyston. But that's something Ben & Jerry's can no longer afford to do. Nor does Greyston want it to. "You can't expect the market to subsidize you or overpay you for the benefit of your mission," Lief says. It's "patronizing," he says, for Greyston to sell baked goods by, in effect, holding up its workers as poster children desperately in need of support. Instead, what Greyston seeks to produce is "a high-quality, competitively priced" product that happens also to further a "social mission," Lief notes.
The relationship with Ben & Jerry's has evolved beyond production methods and efficiency targets. In the fall of 1998 a group of Ben & Jerry's managers attended a Greyston strategy session to discuss its expansion; they offered to help with marketing and business plans. When Lief began scouting out new locations for the bakery this year, Ben & Jerry's sent down a plant engineer to evaluate sites.
If all goes according to plan, Greyston Bakery will have a bigger wholesale plant in 2000. It will be able to double its capacity, grow its line of cakes and tarts, and cut its over-reliance on the partner that helped make it all possible. As for its social mission, Greyston will have more entry-level slots and offer its staff a chance to advance to jobs that require more skills. The number of employees will increase to 80 from 55. A new retail bakery and a Ben & Jerry's outlet, both slated for downtown Yonkers, will add another 10 to 15 jobs.
Lief's other major thrust involves growing Greyston's real estate rental income from $895,000 in 1998 to $1.4 million by 2003. His chosen partner is board chairman Rose, whose development company is based in Katonah, N.Y. (To avoid conflicts of interest, an independent board committee evaluates any contracts with Rose.) Though Greyston has traditionally provided housing for the homeless, it now aims to develop housing for families who have means of support. By Lief's reckoning, much of Greyston's growth in real estate revenues will result from higher rent rolls. From 1996 to 1998, Greyston raised $4 million to build affordable housing in Irvington, a wealthy village about 10 miles north of Yonkers. Greyston owns the top two floors, with 22 apartments, and serves as property manager. The village of Irvington, a partner in the deal, put up another $2 million for a state-of-the-art library on the ground floor. The building opened last Labor Day. Rose, says Lief, "has provided things that we would have had to go out to the market to get, and we'd probably have ended up paying a greater rate."
If the 49-year-old Lief sounds more like a conventional business builder than like a leader in the nonprofit sector, that's simply because the other nonprofit executives haven't yet caught up with him. But it's only a matter of time. Last year the first-ever conference on community-wealth generation, as the field is known, attracted 200 participants to a four-day meeting in Colorado Springs. But Lief worries that nonprofits may jump in without having the resources, expert advice, and partnerships they need. And what better rationale for a venture fund? The one he's helping design with half a dozen other nonprofits -- under a planning grant from the Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan foundations -- would be a source of seed capital and wisdom to nonprofits wanting to build enterprises. "We're asked a lot about how to do it, but we don't really want to start an in-house consulting arm," Lief says.
Not that he examines all Greyston's forthcoming projects with such a strategic eye. He's talking, for instance, about opening a bookstore and café in one of Greyston's apartment buildings. "This is more of a cultural offering to Yonkers rather than a moneymaking venture for us," Lief explains. "There is no bookstore in downtown Yonkers, which I just find unacceptable." For him, that alone is reason enough to do it.
Samuel Fromartz is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
