I spent most of my career harnessing the power of business to effect positive social change. Before and after attending HBS, I helped grow Working Assets (now Credo, founded by Laura Scher, MBA 1985) into a successful social enterprise that has generated more than $80 million for nonprofits. Whereas Working Assets is a for-profit enterprise whose business model includes 1% of revenue being donated to nonprofits, Accion Chicago is a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to build communities through entrepreneurship. [...]

Sesame Workshop (SW) is the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street and much more. SW’s mission is to help kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder. Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen firsthand how that mission suffuses everyone’s work – I’ve never worked in an organization where every employee is truly united and motivated by a singular goal. SW combines fun media with enriching, meticulously crafted curriculum to address children’s critical developmental needs in the U.S. and across the world. My role for the Fellowship year is Director of Strategy – I sit on the strategic planning and venture capital team. [...]

Two days after fall finals, 150 HBS students descended on the Bay area for WesTrek 2017, the largest professional trek at Harvard Business School. Organized by the Tech Club, WesTrek has been an ongoing tradition at the school for the past two decades. This year, the trek grew 25% due to immense interest in technology companies and venture capital. [...]

At Amazon, Tiffany Nida (HBS MBA 2012) leads a fifteen-person team in her current role as senior manager, product management, in one of the company’s frontier business segments, Amazon Transportation. Her five-and-a-half year tenure began, as it does for many Harvard MBAs, with an internship between her Required Curriculum and Elective Curriculum years. [...]

In September 2010, Lauren Coyle, HBS MBA 2010, entered the leadership development program at DaVita Kidney Care. Formally titled, “The Redwoods Program,” it would guide Coyle through a three-phase curriculum that concluded in April 2011, and lead to the general management role for which she had been aiming throughout her earlier career and subsequent business school education. [...]