Matt Reimann - Ice Cream, T-Shirts and Hope at New Avenues for Youth

“Free Cone Day” drew long, winding lines of Portland State University students to a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cart on campus on a warm spring day. Most of the students probably didn’t know they were helping homeless and at-risk youth.The young people handing out the ice cream were working for Portland-based New Avenues for Youth, a non-profit committed to helping at-risk and homeless  youth gain the life skills necessary to lead sustainable lives and avoid lifelong homelessness. The ice cream cart was associated with a Ben & Jerry's PartnerShop New Avenues opened on Yamhill Street in downtown Portland in 2004 and the second PartnerShop located at the Portland State University's Urban Center on SW 6th Avenue and Mill Street that opened in 2011.

The ice cream business is completely staffed with homeless and at-risk youth. New Avenues’ goal is to offer young people real-world work experience and opportunities to build invaluable employment and life skills through job training and entrepreneurial education programs. Established in 1997, New Avenues offers education, job training, transitional housing, drug and alcohol counseling, and programs and services that help meet basic needs.

Like the young people served by New Avenues, Matt Reimann was in a period of transition when he came forward to help New Avenues.

He’d been at Hewlett-Packard for 17 years, working in finance, marketing and operations, when he experienced a searing family tragedy that drove him to rethink who he was and where he was going. “Going back to work after going through that was just impossible, so I left HP,” he said solemnly.

Fortuitously, he encountered Paul Speer, a former HP colleague then serving as Program Director of the SVP Portland Encore Fellowship program.

Though Reimann was just 48, Speer encouraged him to become an Encore Fellow at New Avenues to help grow and strengthen its social enterprise program, including its Ben & Jerry’s operations and a screen printing t-shirt business start-up.

“When you’re knocked down and hit really hard you suffer and you can relate better to people who suffer,” Reimann said. “Homeless kids have been through their own tragedies and they suffer, too. I wanted to give back, connect the two, and use some of my skills that I learned at HP.”New Avenues’ first Ben & Jerry’s PartnerShop had done well in serving a social purpose, but the high social costs of running a social purpose enterprise combined with the seasonality of ice cream created a lack of profitability. With an opportunity to add a second PartnerShop on the horizon and a fledgling idea to open a screen printing business, increasing capacity and business acumen of the agency became a top priority.

When Reimann came on board, New Avenues had already made strides to increase capacity. With a four-year grant from the KeyBank Foundation, Cat Ellingson was hired to fill a new Enterprise Director position overseeing New Avenues’ businesses. A spirited, talented woman with an MBA and an MA in social work, she had a social services background and skills in business management.

“Matt’s role was to come in as part of the Social Enterprise team and help us think more long-term and strategically about what social enterprise was going to look like at New Avenues, how we could we build models, think more systematically about our businesses and expand this part of the organization,” Ellingson said.

“With Matt, we needed to know what does it mean to scale up to two ice cream businesses,” said New Avenues’ Executive Director Sean Suib. “We had a history of running the one Ben & Jerry’s business more like a social program than a business, so what would it mean to expand scale and focus in more on core business functions and operation?”

Suib also wanted Reimann to work on a first draft of the principles upon which the screen printing business would operate, how it would fit within New Avenues and what would need to be considered in making resource allocation decisions.

Reimann and Ellingson started out helping open the second Ben & Jerry’s Partnershop at PSU and getting to know the ice cream business better. They focused on business management and controls, including marketing, inventory management, shift schedules, budgeting, cash flow and needed course corrections.

They also worked on determining how New Avenues could best deliver a high value experience for each youth in the program and achieve financial stability. That meant there needed to be well-defined job descriptions, identification of skills to be taught and put on a resume, job training processes and development of customer service skills.

Reimann also helped New Avenues launch a screen printing t-shirt business, New Avenues INK.For that he rewrote a draft business plan and a pro forma accounting of the company's financial activities. He also made connections in the local screen printing industry and helped write grant applications to fund the start-up, securing grants from United Way of the Columbia-Willamette, the Meyer Memorial Trust and the Collins Foundation.

New Avenues’ board approved the screen printing business  proposal in early 2013 and with a 5-year rent free lease from KeyBank in hand as well as capital funds for the buildout and operations supports, New Avenues third social enterprise was launched. Unlike the Ben & Jerry’s stores, the screen printing company won’t be a retail operation. Instead, the headquarters will be used to manufacture shirts sold to other businesses for such things as events and corporate branding.

“We’re going to sell a high quality product at a competitive price, but the kicker will be that we are doing this while providing a high-quality training experience for kids who can then move on to life sustaining good wage jobs,” Reimann said.

Suib and Ellingson effusively praise Reimann for his New Avenues work. “Coming in as an Encore Fellow, Matt had a real impact without a doubt,” Ellingson said, “with a lot of that being outside the scope of his larger task, such as spearheading a new type of business training for the kids and his insistence on quality training. The single most valuable thing Matt did for us was helping us see that we have to be the best at that.”

Since his Encore Fellowship ended, Reimann has kept an eye on New Avenue’s progress, serving on the Social Purpose Enterprise Advisory Committee and New Avenues Finance Committee, which provides fiscal oversight to the Ben & Jerry’s PartnerShops and New Avenues INK, the screen printing enterprise.