At With Love Community Market and Cafe, we want to be more than just a business. We want to be a profit-making enterprise that uses those profits for the community (social enterprise), to the glory of God. To do this, we needed to find a business model that reflects and supports these commitments. Through our research we found that the business model that best represents our social enterprise mission is a “benefit corporation” structure/status.

Created in 2010, the benefit corporation is a corporate structure designed for a social enterprise like ours. Every business needs to have some sort of business model, whether its a corporation, LLC, sole proprietorship, or some other structure. The type of structure your business chooses affects how it is taxed. It also has legal implications. In most aspects, the benefit corporation operates like a normal business. The difference lies in its purpose. While the goals of most businesses are to maximize profit, the stated goal of a benefit corporation is improving the “public benefit” of society and the environment. This mission, written into the very legal papers forming the benefit corporation, requires the director and officers of the corporation’s board to pursue both financial interest AND public benefit. Benefit corporations are also required to release an annual “benefit report” detailing the business’ impact to the public. This keeps the business transparent about its efforts.

This is all ideal profit-making business that benefits the public! But if you solely focus on just one of those aspects, it will make it hard to have a successful business meeting the stated mission and goals. At With Love, we understand this full well, and know that holding both a profit-making business goal and a socially-impacting business goal equally will be a tension with the decisions we make and how we choose to run the business. The idea that a business can openly hold public benefit on the same level as profit is radical. It challenges the status quo. One advisor we spoke with perfectly articulated the cynical conventional wisdom when he said that “to put sustainable public benefit equal to or primary to profitability is not logical.” Well, when logic elevates profit over people, money over lives, empires over communities, then yes, With Love is not logical. Thankfully, the absence of this logic allows for a humble acceptance of divine vision, of a plan for community transformation with Jesus’ name all over it. A business can succeed while caring about its community and the long-term impact it has, and we are set out to prove it!

Join with us and pray to that end, that we can truly impact and change our community by running a successful business that meets the needs and seeks to empower our community. We can’t do this alone, we’ll need a lot of support to make it happen!