Bill Young spent the first phase of his career making money and he did very well at it. A former chartered accountant who also holds an MBA from Harvard University, Young started Hamilton Computers and turned it into a national company that bought computer hardware from manufacturers and resold it to commercial and institutional clients.

Sales had reached $200 million annually by the time he sold out to GE Capital.

That made him wealthy, but Young was fortunate enough to enjoy a second windfall.

In the mid-1990s, his cousin Bob Young co-founded Red Hat Inc., which has since become the world's largest distributor of the Linux operating system.

Young bought shares through a private offering when Red Hat was a startup. The company went public in August 1999, and enjoyed the eighth highest first-day gain in value in the history of Wall Street.

Young's investment went through the roof.

"I'm one of those lucky people whose ship came in in the private sector," says the entrepreneur, who is now 52. "I have more money than I'm ever going to need."

Five years ago, he decided it was time to change direction and use his money to make a difference in the world.

He founded Social Capital Partners, a venture-capital firm that invests in startup companies and looks for a social rather than a financial return.

In exchange for low-cost financing, business owners must agree to hire people who are on the sidelines and facing barriers to employment. Recruiting must be done through recognized social agencies that provide training in preparation for entering the workforce.

Young says that finding the right companies and employers who understand his concept has been difficult.

Consequently, Social Capital has grown slowly and has only invested about $1.3 million in eight companies.

Nevertheless, Social Capital has found some worthy recipients.

These include a downtown Toronto bicycle courier company that hires homeless youths out of shelters, and a Winnipeg home-renovation company that is employing urban Aboriginals.

Young has also put money into a Vancouver property-maintenance firm that recruits women who have been victims of violence and men from the socially blighted downtown east side.

The women generally do administrative jobs while the men handle security.

"Our model helps the job-ready segment of disadvantaged populations," he says. "These are people who are ready to help themselves. They just need to be given a chance."

Up till now, Young and his associates at Social Capital have spent a good deal of their time looking for partners in the non-profit sector.

People there understand the societal benefits. They are generally enthusiastic, but too often lack practical business experience.

Now Young has shifted his focus in order to expand the portfolio.

He and his associates are looking at lending to prospective franchisees who frequently have difficult obtaining bank financing and must turn to family or friends for funds to keep them going till their businesses begin generating cashflow.

"About a year and a half ago we decided that if we're going to make this a mainstream idea we need to figure a way to engage the private sector," he says. "We needed a cookie-cutter model. Franchising was a natural. We can work with proven systems.

"We don't have to figure out the business side. Ten years from now we could have thousands of people working for hundreds of franchises."

To date, he has been working with two franchisors, Active Green + Ross, a chain of auto-service centres in southern Ontario, and the moving company Two Men And A Truck.

Social Capital has agreed to finance a Two Men franchisee who left home before he was 16 and wound up in a shelter for the homeless.

This individual has been employed for more than 20 years and has the ability to run his own business, but he also understands what it means to be down and out. Favourable financing will help him get started and he will be in a position to hire people stuck at the margins.

Young has found selling a concept a bigger challenge than pitching a product. But he has no doubt that he's made the right choice.

"I was hugely lucky," he says. "I can't conceive of needing more money. I wasn't interested in running another company that was going to be a stock-market darling. This is what I'll do for the rest of my career."

And if it's third time lucky for Bill Young, the world will be a better place.

(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)