Impact of the Farber Program
A full service landscape contractor that trains and hires disabled and disadvantaged men and women.
Rubicon Programs has hosted eleven Farber Interns and one Farber Fellow since the Farber Program launched in 1997. Rubicon’s mission is to prepare very low-income people to achieve financial independence and to partner with people with mental illness on their journey of recovery. Since 1973, Rubicon has provided employment, housing, mental health, and other supportive services to individuals who are very low-income, especially people who are homeless or have mental illness. Based in Richmond, California, Rubicon Programs offers services throughout Contra Costa and Alameda counties. Our social purpose business, Rubicon Landscape, beautifies commercial and public grounds throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rubicon’s businesses have worked extensively with Farber Interns in recent years.
John Tammen, General Manager of Rubicon Landscape, observes how the work of three Farber Interns successively built upon itself each year to help strengthen the enterprise. “Two years ago, our intern helped us identify the types of customers who would be our best prospects. The next summer’s intern helped us create marketing literature — building on the work of the first intern to put together materials that emphasized all the things that our most promising customers would want to see. Then our most recent intern helped us implement systems to assure we deliver the services we promised.” This most recent intern was Samantha Nobles from The Anderson School of Business, UCLA, who spent the summer of 2006 developing a quality assurance process and system to help the business better manage its customer relationships. John believes that this process “has definitely created a better working relationship with our customer. Actually there’s a contract that we’re just negotiating right now where the prospect is specifically requesting information on how we will approach quality assurance...and our new system is certainly something that they were impressed with and helped us get the work.”
John sees these summer experiences as incredible learning opportunities for Farber Interns. “I think what the intern gets out of this is a chance to be a part of a social enterprise and to make a contribution. They’re going to be challenged by all the things that we’re challenged with day-to-day in terms of understanding the customers we deal with, the workers we work with — they have a lot of exposure to that.”
And for Rubicon Programs, John sees many benefits, both in the short and long term, to participating in the Farber Program. “The short-term benefit is that somebody can come in and be focused on something that’s very important. We all have our day-to-day jobs and there’s a big tendency to get absorbed in the things that are urgent. To have somebody here who is focused on something very specific...has been invigorating.”
In the longer term, John believes the Farber Program’s value is in the impact that interns can have. “So far we’re still very much using all the things that these interns have contributed. They’ve made a definite impact and nothing’s sitting on the shelf...there’s definitely been a growth in what we’ve been able to accomplish.”
Farber Supervisor: John Tammen, General Manager (MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 1979)
