Social enterprise gives former offenders a second chance

In Victoria, every second person that leaves prison returns within 24 months.

Two friends are hoping to put a stop to this with a new social enterprise, Fruit2work, which creates second chance jobs for former offenders.

“Our employees (who are former offenders) pack and deliver fruit to offices in Melbourne,” said Fruit2work, Co-Founder and Director, Ariel Hersh.

This cause was very close to heart for Co-Founder, Doron Lavan, who experienced the reality of the situation while working at Barwon Prison as a psychologist.

“Doron and I went to school together. I have experience in supporting social enterprises in the impact investment space. My professional background is in strategy consulting and when we were discussing this problem, we felt we could apply a market-based solution to this,” said Hersh.

When a former offender gets out of prison, they are known to struggle to find regular work.

“Doron and I came together and said we can solve this problem by creating the jobs ourselves,” Hersh told Third Sector.

“We felt that we could use a social enterprise in an innovative way and help reduce the amount of reoffending.

“We were inspired by a number of oversees organisations.”

Fruit2work have partnered with two charities, TaskForce and FirstStep, in order to help streamline the hiring process.

“About two months ago we said ‘We have now created enough work and we have enough money to hire someone’ and what we do is we go to our charity partner and we tell them we are ready for someone and they identify someone for the job that they know well,” said Hersh.

The former offenders undergo work readiness testing through a counsellor and need to show that they are taking the correct steps towards reintegration.

“We provide our employees with counselling and mentoring through our charity partners,” he said.

The co-founders have been selected for a number of social accelerators. Hersh is a 2016 Young Social Pioneer with the Foundation for Young Australians. Lavan is participating in Y Gap’s Spark program.

“We have been really lucky in the financial help that we have received. We have been selective by the Victorian Government to receive quite a substantial grant and we are also grateful to our other supporters who have given us some money to support us,” said Hersh.

“One of the things that we did to enable our first program participant to join us is we crowd funded six and a half grand which a volunteer helped coordinate.”

Hersh told Third Sector that he hopes to sell more boxes so that they can provide more program placements.

“We create second chances by doing something most people are doing already – buying healthy food,” he said.

“We have had a number of customers as well who never bought fruit – giving them an opportunity to create second chances.

“We are looking to scale the amount of boxes we are able to sell. We have a number of growth opportunities but for the moment we are just based in Melbourne.”

Hersh said it has been a real learning journey over the past few months and Fruit2work are very ready and excited to accelerate this growth.