Juma runs over 20 concession businesses at major sports and entertainment venues across the West Coast.
Juma Ventures’ social enterprise started with one Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop in San Francisco with a goal to provide homeless youth necessary training and job experience to build economically stable lives.
Over 30 years later, Juma now owns and operates over 20 concession businesses at major sports and entertainment venues across Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle.
Through its partnerships with stadiums, arenas and concert amphitheaters in these four West coast cities – including Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center – Juma’s social enterprise model annually employs hundreds of youth between the ages of 16 to 24 from low-income, underserved backgrounds. These opportunities offer entry-level job experience without the socioeconomic or racial barriers that exist in the open labor market.
“On-Ramp” into the workforce
Many of Juma’s youth participants grew up in poverty, foster care, the juvenile justice system or suffered significant trauma. For these young folks, career obstacles extend beyond just the hiring process.
Juma’s CEO Adriane Armstrong says that overcoming these challenges is at the core of the organization’s mission. “We often work with young people who may not have any other on-ramp into the workforce… Juma will be job one and will help connect them to job two,” Armstrong said.
Functioning as “job one,” Juma’s employment opportunities help participants gain a variety of transferable job skills, providing standardized training in fields such as product sales and retail technology while promoting their workers’ confidence and self-esteem.
“We create a supportive work environment where young people [can] probably fail a bit,” said Armstrong, who started at Juma as a volunteer in 2005.
“Juma reframes those failures as coachable, teachable moments instead of fireable offenses.”
This allows the organization’s youth to continue to build their work history and parlay that experience into jobs in other industries down the road.
A holistic approach
Since its inception, Juma’s social enterprise model has employed more than 10,000 low-income youth, who have earned a combined $14 million in wages and generated $42 million in enterprise revenue. These numbers are impressive, but alone they don’t tell the full story.
The social enterprise’s revenue, coupled with donations like the sum provided by the NBA Foundation’s grant, are what support Juma’s holistic off-the-job-site programming. These services include: resume writing workshops, mock interviews, and one-on-one career mentorship, as well as courses in financial literacy and responsibility. In 2023, Juma reported that 95% of its participants had savings accounts.
The personal and economic security Juma cultivates goes hand-in-hand with unlocking pathways to higher education. According to Armstrong, Juma’s jobs offer young people stability to think about their future education in addition to careers they might want to pursue. The organization encourages its youth members to set academic goals such as earning their GED or enrolling in community colleges. As a result, participants have saved $6.4 million on post-secondary education to date.
While Juma’s array of services is comprehensive, the organization remains clear on one simple goal: “We really just want to help our young people think about futures that they maybe never considered before,” Armstrong said.
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To learn more about Juma Ventures please visit https://www.juma.org/.
