Nearly 70 million Americans have a criminal record. Most employers never get past that fact on an application. CleanTurn in Columbus, Ohio starts there (not with a screening question, but with a job offer) and has created over 500 employment opportunities for people who were incarcerated, formerly homeless, or recovering from addiction.
The business model is commercial cleaning, demolition, and interior demolition services. The social model is everything wrapped around the job itself.
What Open Hiring Looks Like in Practice
CleanTurn was founded by John Rush with a premise borrowed from the same neighborhood of thinking as Greyston Bakery: if you create a barrier-free pathway to employment, people who’ve been excluded will fill the jobs, and most of them will succeed given the right support.
In five years, CleanTurn has created more than 500 employment opportunities and served over 1,000 customers in the greater Columbus area. The workforce includes people affected by incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, human trafficking, and domestic violence. The company also operates She Has A Name Cleaning Services, a sister company specifically focused on women affected by domestic violence or trafficking.
The commercial services (cleaning, demolition, grounds keeping) are legitimate businesses that compete for real contracts with commercial clients, property managers, and construction companies. This isn’t a sheltered workshop. It’s a market-rate operation that happens to employ people most businesses wouldn’t consider.
The Support System That Creates Durability
Employment alone doesn’t reverse years of compounding disadvantage. CleanTurn wraps the job with career advancement training, professional development, financial literacy classes, legal advice, housing assistance, and connections to recovery support for employees in addiction recovery.
The organization has a specific policy that requires employees to report any relapse (even years into recovery) so CleanTurn can offer rehab support rather than termination. That’s a deliberate cultural choice: treating relapse as a medical situation rather than a firing offense is both more humane and statistically more likely to result in long-term employment stability.
Partnerships with Columbus Police Department and local schools extend the organization’s reach into prevention: providing job training in crime prevention and safety to high school students who might otherwise cycle into the same system CleanTurn’s employees are exiting.
The test of any employment social enterprise isn’t whether people get hired. It’s whether they’re still employed — and better off — two years later. CleanTurn’s sustainability model is built around that longer arc.
The Self-Sustaining Structure
CleanTurn describes itself as having generated over $200 million in community impact through 50 partner organizations: a figure that reflects the broader economic multiplier of stable employment, rather than direct revenue. The key design principle is that the model doesn’t rely on grants or philanthropy to stay operational: the commercial cleaning and demolition work generates the revenue that funds the employment programs.
This self-sustainability is what allows growth. Grant-funded social enterprises plateau or disappear when funding cycles end. Commercial social enterprises can expand because their economics improve with scale.
The 2022 acquisition of a 3,000-square-foot building in Franklinton expanded CleanTurn’s headquarters with offices, storage, and facilities for employees: a capital investment that reflects confidence in the commercial model’s durability.
To find out more about CleanTurn, visit their:
P.S. If your organization uses commercial cleaning or demolition services in the Columbus area, contracting with CleanTurn is one of the more direct ways to put purchasing decisions to work on employment equity.