Fieldwork Immerses Students in Social Enterprise from Boston to Vietnam

Social Enterprise Newsletter, Winter 2000

When Erik Dyson (MBA'99) met Father Flavin Mucci, a native Bostonian who leads a nonprofit in El Salvador, he was impressed both by the Franciscan friar's compassion for people in need and by his entreprenuership. Mucci's organization, Agape, provides services to 250,000 El Salvadorians and generates 80 percent of its funding through its own businesses. In Mucci, Dyson saw an opportunity to learn about nonprofit management and to help strengthen this 20-year-old institution. He convinced classmates Jeff Williams and David Bywater to join him in a Social Enterprise Field Study, which turned out to be, they all agree, the most rewarding part of their MBA experience.

The team's work with Agape (the Greek word for unconditional love) is just one example of how students can take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to social enterprises. Working either through summer internships or field studies, last year more than 60 Harvard Business School MBA students gained hands-on experience in nonprofit management. From Boston to Vietnam, students found that social enterprise fieldwork offered an excellent opportunity for setting their learning into practice and for making a difference. The agencies, in turn, benefit from the business know-how the MBAs bring to their organization.

Nonprofit and Public Management Summer Fellowships

The HBS Nonprofit and Public Management Fellowship provides supplemental funding to students taking summer positions in the nonprofit sector. Students get a close-up, in-depth look at management in social sector organizations like the Nature Conservancy, the International Rescue Committee, and the World Bank, and the organizations benefit from having an experienced, enthusiastic student of business as a full-time summer staff member. This year 24 students worked as fellows.

Fellowship recipient Margaret Molloy (MBA '00), for example, put her business skills to work in a New York City social service agency last summer. Molloy worked as a consultant to Project Renewal, a 30-year-old outreach organization that trains hard-to-employ people to enter the workplace.

Molloy came to Project Renewal with a desire to give something back to New York City, where she had worked for five years prior to entering the MBA Program. Her ten-week internship at Project Renewal centered on evaluating funding sources, investigating potential partnerships, and researching the feasibility of a fish farming project the agency was considering. She attended board meetings, met with clients, and worked closely with aquaculture experts to determine whether Project Renewal might provide jobs for its clients and meet the growing demand for fresh fish in New York. "The project was academically challenging," she says. "I relied very much on what I'd learned in my first-year courses." Molloy's research was of great use to Project Renewal. "Margaret's business sense and her intelligence really led this project," says Project Renewal executive director Edward Geffner. "She accomplished a tremendous amount--much more than we had expected--and we are now moving forward thanks to her."

Chosen as a Kauffman Social Entrepreneur intern, through a grant to HBS from the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Molloy is linking her summer experience to a curriculum-based experience in her second year of the MBA Program.

HBS Community Enterprise

The HBS Community Enterprise program, launched in 1996 in partnership with McKinsey & Company and The Boston Foundation, sends small teams of students to locally-based nonprofits for the summer. This year eight MBAs took on full-time consulting positions, working closely with senior management in the organizations and with consultants from McKinsey and HBS.

Community Enterprise fellows Stratton Lloyd, Karen Weigert, and Hannah Wu (all MBA '00), spent the summer working with the Office of Business Development for the City of Boston. Investigating both internal and external challenges, the group looked at how the newly consolidated office could work more closely together and how they could more effectively reach their target customers--small and medium-sized businesses.

"The HBS team's work was incredibly important to us," says Kathy Kottaridis, director of the Office of Business Development. "They helped us move along several concepts we were considering and developed new ideas that we are now implementing." The team members agree that the concrete items they delivered--a marketing plan, a new services delivery plan, and portfolio management tools--were an important part of what they brought to the City. But they stress that by leveraging their own business experience and the expertise of their McKinsey colleagues they were able to help the City of Boston problem solve for the future. "I think the residual value that we left behind was demonstrating to them that with simple analysis--like going out and talking to your customers--you can get so much more information to work with," Wu says.

"We had a tremendous response to the program this year," notes Bob Burakoff, an HBS Senior Research Fellow who has overseen the Community Enterprise program since he helped create it when he directed the HBS Initiative on Social Enterprise. "It's now recognized as a high-impact engagement by both the students and the clients." Summer internships can also act as a springboard for future career and research opportunities. Lloyd, Weigert, and Wu plan to write a paper investigating some of the issues facing the Office of Business Development in a field project this year.

Field studies

Student interest in social enterprise field studies is on the rise--in 1999 there was a 50 percent increase in the number of students participating from the previous year. Field Studies complement classroom learning by allowing MBAs to apply their skills to real-world challenges facing social enterprises. Under faculty supervision, teams of three to six students work on projects of strategic importance to organizations and report their recommendations at the end of the term.

When Erik Dyson, Jeff Williams, and David Bywater first traveled to El Salvador during last year's winter break, they had their work cut out for them. They spent seven intense days immersed in their new surroundings--learning about Agape through informal interviews with employees, volunteers, board members, and the recipients of its services. They found a strong organization that ran ten successful businesses (including a radio station, a hotel, and a restaurant) which helped fund ten social service programs, such as a mobile clinic, a homeless shelter, and a hospital for malnourished children. But they feared that the agency's future was in jeopardy. Since the end of El Salvador's civil war, Agape was facing more competition as large businesses moved into their territory.

Armed with their data, the students spent the semester developing a comprehensive analysis of the organization's strengths and weaknesses, creating a business plan, and crafting a marketing document for Agape. They met regularly with faculty advisors James Austin and Allen Grossman and were in frequent contact with Father Mucci and the agency's executive director. At the end of the semester, they presented their research to Agape leadership, spending four days discussing their findings, brainstorming ideas, and helping the agency figure out next steps. "Father Mucci has built a tremendous organization," notes Bywater. "Agape has a very high brand recognition in El Salvador." The team encouraged Agape to use its reputation to strengthen the organization. "They were very excited about the idea of social branding," adds Dyson.

"We now possess a small treasure of information," notes Father Mucci of the team's work. "I am sure that we are on the right road and that we will be able to help even more poor people."

1999 Summer Fellows

• Sarah Alexander
  The Nature Conservancy; Arlington, VA
• Matthew Anestis
  The Democracy Network; Los Angeles, CA
• Amine Britel
  Interchange Institute; Brookline, MA
• Stacy Childress*
  Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston
• Nancy Collins
  International Rescue Committee; Skopje, Macedonia
• Vanya Desai*
  Frederick Douglass Charter School; Boston, MA
• Francisco Elizondo
  Initiative for a Competitive Inner City; Boston, MA
• Julio Farach
  Endeavor Initiative; Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Lisa Gunther*
  Frederick Douglass Charter School; Boston, MA
• Stephanie Hirsch
  Public/Private Ventures; Philadelphia, PA
• Ray Jefferson
  Pacific Asian Management Institute; Honolulu, HI
• Raymond Joseph
  Prep for Prep; New York, NY
• Karen Kaufman
  National Security Program; Cambridge, MA
• Purnima Kochikar*
  Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston
• Stratton Lloyd*
  Office of Business Development for City of Boston
• Shivam Mallick
  The Community Builders and the Mayor of Philadelphia's Office of Policy and Planning; Washington, DC and Philadelphia, PA
• Coleman Mark
  Non-Profit Performance Initiative; San Francisco, CA
• Axel Martinez
  Central Bank of Honduras; Tegucigalpa, Honduras
• Margaret Molloy
  Project Renewal ; New York, NY
• Marcelo Morales
  The Nature Conservancy; Monterrey, Mexico
• Lynette Ng
  The Nature Conservancy; Vancouver, Canada
• Nicole Nguyen
  Foreign Commercial Services of the U.S. Embassy; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Ndidi Okonkwo
  Ford Foundation West Africa; Lagos, Nigeria
• Jodi Prins*
  Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston
• Michael Ryder
  Internal Finance Corporation at World Bank; Washington, DC
• Joshua Singer
  Children's Rights; New York, NY
• Marc Sternberg
  Community Wealth Ventures; New York, NY
• Marlon Sullivan
  Initiative for a Competitive Inner City; Boston, MA
• Marshall Tuck
  Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone; New York, NY
• Miguel Valentin
  ACCION; Lima, Peru
• Karen Weigert*
  Office of Business Development for City of Boston
• Hannah Wu*
  Office of Business Development for City of Boston

*Indicates HBS Community Enterprise Fellows