| 1.1 | The Concept |
| 1.2 | The Opportunity |
| 1.3 | Entry and Growth |
| 1.4 | Projected Social Impact |
The Hub's mission is to form supportive communities within places of employment to help underserved entry-level employees enhance their quality of life. The Hub will build its community by pairing experienced employees with newly-hired staff, facilitating mentoring relationships. Mentoring traditionally brings powerful benefits including workfore integration and personal growth and the Hub adds an extra layer by using the relationships to connect new employees with fringe benefits from their employer and community resources. This arrangement fosters better employer-employee relations while empowering and providing material resources for employed individuals.
Most large employers offer fringe benefits to their employees, including health care and child care subsidies. Yet despite the best efforts of employers, new employees can easily become lost in a different and intimidating workplace culture. Entry-level employees in particular who would most benefit from these services often do not have the knowledge or awareness necessary to take advantage of them. Within these unaddressed problems lies the opportunity. Through the mentoring relationship, the Hub pairs existing employees who understand the workplace system to bring new employees up to speed on the available benefits. The Hub is thus able to leverage existing employer resources in the framework of a mentoring program to add value to the lives of the entry-level workforce. These relationships form the basis of a supportive, workplace community.
Entry-level employees represent a traditionally underserved population with respect to employer benefits. Entry-level employees tend to work low-paying, labor-intensive jobs requiring few skills and long hours. High turnover is common due to the undesirable nature of the work. Additions to the strain on such individuals may include unaffordable childcare, language and literacy barriers, and a long daily commute (many low-income workers live far from their workplaces due to inflated housing prices and cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area). Though as a result newly-hired entry-level employees stand to gain from personal attention and education about benefits and resources, until now successes have been few in reaching out to this community to ensure benefits and resources are utilized. Our venture is unique in that it fills this under-developed niche in employer-centered, entry-level workforce support services.
The Hub seeks to pilot its program at Stanford University. The initial mentee pilot population will consist largely of new employees placed by Springboard Forward, a nonprofit placement agency, and initial mentors will be recruited through publicity at staff meetings.
After the initial pilot program, the Hub will expand its services to all new Stanford employees. Once a Stanford employee support community has been established, the Hub will have a template for supportive workplace communities at large employers throughout the Bay Area, hoping to eventually spread nationwide.
The Hub will rely on seed money from foundation and government grants throughout the Planning and Pilot phases and the first three years of operation, when self-sufficiency will be achieved. Self-sufficiency is achieved by relying on additional service payments from the employer for each additional mentor-mentee pair in the program, these payments will cover total expenses.
New employees benefit from the Hub through being connected with benefits and resources offered by their employer and the surrounding community. Mentors benefit from being part of the Hub program because as they participate in mentor training, they are educating themselves about the benefits and resources that Stanford has to offer employees. Large employers like Stanford benefit from our program by having a lower turnover rate for a more stable entry-level workforce and better employer-employee relations