Homeless Artists Given Power to Earn by MIT Sloan MBA Startup

A startup founded by an MBA student at MIT Sloan is using the public benefit corporation business model to give homeless artists an opportunity to sell their artwork and earn their own income.

55% of the proceeds of the artwork sold through ArtLifting goes into the artists’ pockets with the rest retained by the company – a similar setup to a traditional private gallery model. The difference lies in providing talented, but impoverished, people with an appropriate platform for their work. The startup was founded by MIT Sloan student, Spencer Powers and his sister, Liz, after the latter had spent the best part of a decade running art groups in homeless shelters and seeing the quality of work produced there go largely to waste.

Opting for a public benefit corporation model

The startup was founded at the end of 2013, the same year in which the US state of Delaware passed a new form of public benefit corporation into law, one which essentially lays out the criteria by which a for-profit corporation can be registered and held to its commitment to pursue a public benefit at the same time as pursuing a profit. The next year, both of the Powers siblings were admitted into MIT Sloan, though only Spencer took up his place, while Liz handles the company’s daily operations. Spencer is using his MBA to learn as much as possible about how they can make their business a lasting success.

“Businesses don’t need to be agnostic to have social impact. They can build it into their business model,” Spencer says in an article for MIT Sloan, with his sister adding that they “are very proud to be a for-profit, benefit corporation.” In the Huffington Post last year, Liz Powers stressed her belief that stepping away from the fight for funding grants and taking the public benefit corporation path would allow their organization to have a greater impact: “I didn't want to rely on grant money to grow. I wanted to grow the pot of money.”

An expanding startup

ArtLifting recently raised over a million dollars in seed funding and has progressed from working with four artists in Boston to more than 70 across eight different cities in the US. Artist and company revenue is generated through the online sale of original art pieces as well as prints, posters and accessories. Five artists involved in the scheme are now said to have found homes, not purely as a result of sales, but because of the boost to their confidence it has given them – not least, in being taken seriously as an artist and indeed, a professional of any description.

Spencer, who is set to graduate later this year, name-checks one MIT Sloan course on new enterprises as being particularly beneficial to the business – for highlighting things they might have previously overlooked and for formalizing his understanding of the entrepreneurial process. Simply called New Enterprises, the course has been taught by Bill Aulet, the managing director of MIT’s entrepreneurship center. The startup founder also credits two books – Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup and Blake Mykoskie’s Start Something that Matters – for providing words of inspiration. Interestingly, both authors are now said to have invested in the Powers’ public benefit corporation.