Have a social impact with your work within a large organization. Jory de Groot does it! She works for the police as a Job Appointment coordinator and creates jobs for people with a distance from the labor market. To give more body to her social entrepreneurship, she has decided to participate in the Social Entrepreneurship Course in 2021.
“I regularly speak to candidates who always dreamed of working for the police, but thought they couldn't because of their disability,” says Jory. "Such a story motivates me, then I just go a step hard to find a suitable position for him or her."
Read camera images
Jory worked at the investigation service until a year ago. During her volunteer work with people with disabilities, Jory discovered that people with autism are likely to be very good at recognizing people in crowds. "When we went to look at camera footage for a few hundred hours at one point looking for suspects, I thought of that." And the new 'camera image specialist' position was a fact, filled in by people with autism. Precisely because of their limitation, they can read well-focused camera images.
“In the past year, we have created 60 jobs for people with a distance to the labor market.”
“After this project, we started to look wider. In the past year, we have created 60 jobs for people with a distance to the labor market. For example, for people with visual impairments who listen to or extinguish conversation recordings and hearing impaired people who run a coffee bar.”
Social entrepreneurship
Jory has long focused on developing various initiatives, without being aware that this is a form of social entrepreneurship. Partly through contact with social entrepreneurs during her work, that realization came, and she decided to follow an education to further develop her entrepreneurship.
During the Social Entrepreneurship Course, she hopes, among other things, to learn to think and act more commercially. “The police are a non-profit organization, but initiatives must have an impact here,” Jory says. “For the scaling up and rolling out of projects, it is important to think more commercially. I think you create more support and the roll-out of projects is easier, when you can show both the social and financial value of a project.”
"The vision and the social purpose are central."
Big impact
“Because the police are a huge organization and employer, I can hardly have such an impact with my work anywhere. My ambition is that working for the police will soon be possible for everyone. It's nice to be able to work on that. With this course, I also want to investigate how I can do that more from a separate social enterprise within the police.”
What does Jory appeal to about social entrepreneurship? “The vision and the social goal are central, not just the profit. You are also working on innovations that contribute to a livable world for everyone. Something we all need.”