Before coming to HBS, I worked for a number of years in financial services in Asia. It was not uncommon for me to wonder what real benefit, other than to provide my clients with the ability to make more money, I was providing to the world. That desire is one of the reasons I wanted to come to HBS. I recently took the class “Investing in the 21st Century: Return, Risk and Impact,” taught by Professors Shawn Cole and Vikram S. Gandhi. Through this class I learned that my previous career could actually provide a positive impact on the world, and that impact investing is becoming more mainstream in the United States. There are many impact funds that manage to achieve market rates of return while at the same time generate positive impact. In the past decade, the ability to measure impact has improved, enhancing the investor’s confidence in this sector. [...]

Chienye Ogwo, the CEO of Africa Initiative for Governance in Nigeria, is a lifelong learner who aspires to be at the cutting edge of her work. Seeking the knowledge and skills to maximize the impact she and her organization have on positive change, she attended the Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management (SPNM) program at Harvard Business School Executive Education. In this interview, she describes what she gained from attending the program. [...]

“In tech,” Henry Tsai (MBA 2017) says, “it’s ingrained in you to ask, ‘Where can I be impactful?’” After a summer internship serving in the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, Henry’s target location came into view. “Of all the different levels of government, cities are the closest thing to a business. Strategically, it made sense to look at public sector service at the city level.” [...]

While Mizuho Kanai (MBA 2018) was fulfilling her summer internship at NPR, her manager recommended that she read an HBS case study about how the Sesame Workshop CEO, Jeff Dunn (MBA 1981), was changing the institution. “I was blown away,” she says, “by how Jeff and his team were bringing business rigor to the institution.” [...]

Brightside is an online mentoring nonprofit organisation based in the UK. Founded in 2003, Brightside is one of the largest online mentoring models, working with over 10,000 young people from low-income backgrounds throughout the UK every year. The organisation finds and trains mentors from across industries and leverages an online platform to connect them with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. [...]