Spring 2008 Projects
In Spring 2008, there were four projects staffed by
nine MBA students both full-time and part-time. The
following are the organizations that received
assistance from the students:
InterConnection: Facilitating access to the Internet to undeserved
populations
Since 1999, InterConnection Seattle
has worked to facilitate access to the Internet by
providing training, low-cost refurbished computers
and Internet services to underserved local and
global populations. So far the organization has had
a successful and sustainable venture with
Interconnection Uganda, developing a business model
under which refurbished PC’s are shipped to Uganda
for final assembly and some software installation.
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Objective: This project
aims to develop a packaged framework to
determine the feasibility of new resale ventures
offshore. The package will include a
spreadsheet-based financial model to analyze the
main costs of the operation, along with a
general guideline to asses the target market and
facilitate the establishment of new operations
offshore.
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MBA Students: Jorge Diaz, Joshua Israel,
Jonathan Hollaway
Slum Doctor Programme:
Providing hope, medicine, food, education and
dignity to orphans and HIV/AIDS victims in Africa
The Slum Doctor Programme (SDP)
is a multi-citizen effort to provide hope, medicine,
food, education and dignity to orphans and people
living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. SDP works to provide
emergency medical care in Kenya and help widows in
Uganda start their own businesses so they can
support their families.
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Objective: The proposed project would
involve developing a strategy to market SDP to
potential web based donors as well as help
develop the skills necessary to develop a
interactive relationship to the worldwide AIDS
relief community. The project would also require
the consultants to develop an action plan as
well as an affordable budget for the
technological infrastructure necessary to
activate the process.
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MBA Students: Aditya Naik and Tinu
Ogunde
O.U.R. House of Central
Vermont: Providing a safe and
supportive environment to assist survivors and
families of child sexual abuse
O.U.R. House of
Central Vermont is a non-profit organization
providing a safe and supportive environment to
assist victims, adult survivors and families in the
prevention, discovery, intervention, and healing of
child sexual abuse. They provide a safe and
child-friendly facility where trained police and
Vermont Department for Children and Families
investigators can interview children to determine if
sexual abuse has occurred.
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Objective: The goal for
this project is to develop a 3-5 year strategic
plan that includes a financial plan. The
objective is to improve the consistency of
funding from grants, private funding, donations,
and fundraising. Part of the financial plan
will include planning a budget for the
non-profit.
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MBA Students: Christen Hartnett and Greg
Miller
Fall 2007 Projects
In Fall 2007, there were eight projects
staffed by 16 first year, full-time MBA
students. The following are the
organizations that received assistance
from the students:
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BLOK:
BLOK
is online organizational tool that
received favorable reviews from
educators that were surveyed. It has
the potential of being a very
helpful and useful tool for
educators, parents and students
trying to organize their academic
careers.
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Digital All Systems:
Digit All Systems, Inc. is a 501(c)3
non-profit corporation committed to
bridging the digital divide and
bringing the benefits of expanding
technology to everyone. It was
founded in September 1998 and has
since served more than 435 clients.
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Generations Community Development
Corporation: Generations
Community Development Corporation is
a non-profit that helps
deliver job-training and other
services to unemployed and
underemployed Chicago residents.
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Hiyaah Power: Hiyaah Power is a
dynamic online community
that consists of a network of
over 40,000 women in 40 states, the
UK and Caribbean. It was created to
serve as an online conduit of
information for women.
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North East Community Center:
The NECC is a non-profit social
services organization based out of
Millerton, NY. They run a variety of
programs for toddlers, children and
senior citizens, and also get grants
from a number of donors.
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Project PLASE:
Project
PLASE, Inc. addresses homelessness
by providing transitional housing,
permanent housing and supportive
services
to homeless adults. They serve the
most vulnerable and undeserved,
including persons with mental
illness, HIV/AIDS, addiction,
developmental disabilities, and
ex-offenders, etc.
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High Voltage Youth Camp:
High Voltage Youth Camp is a
non-profit organization that
provides educational as well as
recreational programs for
economically disadvantaged youth,
ages 14-19, to realize their
potential, build character, and to
function effectively as contributing
members of society.
Projects in Focus:
Generations Community Development
Corporation:
Written
by Brian Gottlieb
On January 22 and 23, Aditya Betala
and Brian Gottlieb braved two
freezing days in the windy city in
order to fulfill the duties of their
Fall 2008 Social Venturing project.
This project was due to the
generosity of Michael Mann, founder
of Grassroots.org. Up until this
point, their project contact,
Deborah Young, was only a kindly
voice on the phone and they were
anxious to meet her in person.
Deborah is the director of the
Generations Community Development
Coporation, a non-profit that helps
deliver job-training and other
services to unemployed and
underemployed Chicago residents. The
project goal was to design and
program a database to track the
progress of program participants and
then implement the database over
Generations' office network.
The trip was a great success.
Deborah and her board were pleased
with the database design and felt
that it would be an invaluable tool
in running the Generations' program.
Unfortunately, for their free time,
while demonstrating the database,
Deborah and her team became so
excited that they though up a
handful of new features that they
hoped to be added to (a never before
discussed) "version two" of the
database. So the students were hard
at work creating an upgrade to the
database.
In addition to being persuaded to do
more work, the students managed to
have a lot of fun. Deborah and her
team were all very friendly and
welcoming. They also had a good time
out the one night they had in town.
They explored Michigan Street, the
Navy Pier and the Sears Tower and
ate about a dozen slices of
Chicago-style pizza between the two
of them. Great fun all around.
North East Community Center:
Written by Luz Camargo Agudelo, Arun
Karthikeyan and Aditya Saini
North East Community Center (NECC) is a
non-profit social services organization
based out of Millerton, NY. They run a
variety of programs for toddlers,
children and senior citizens, and also
get grants from a number of donors. NECC
approached the Dingman Center seeking a
cost-effective new database to better
run their daily and long-term
operations.
The Dingman Center team dived into the
problem immediately and tried to fully
analyze the issues at hand. Phone
interviews were conducted with different
staff members at NECC and an attempt was
made to understand their individual
requirements. Different staff members
run different programs and deal with
various kinds of data on members, donors
and programs. Their mode of recording
and storing data is also very diverse –
some used Excel spreadsheets, some used
an existing database (e-Tapestry) and
some others relied on paper.
Once the problem was clearly identified,
the Dingman Center team began a search
for a new database that could increase
NECC’s operational efficiency. NECC was
spending $2,400 per year on e-Tapestry
but were not entirely satisfied with its
offerings. One of the objectives for the
Dingman Center team was to ensure that
the new database fits NECC’s budget.
Other constraints for the new database
were that it should be easy to
understand to all present and future
employees, easy to configure and link
sub-databases within the system, and
have access from anywhere across the
internet.
After testing many sample databases,
Webex Web Office was identified as a
near-perfect solution for NECC’s
database requirements. The Dingman
Center team was in close contact with
NECC’s Executive Director, Jenny Hansel,
and demonstrated the power and relevance
of Webex to her via a detailed
PowerPoint presentation. After NECC
accepted the team’s initial
recommendation of Webex (and reasoning
for rejecting other available
databases), the team mapped out a
detailed structure of sub-databases
within Webex, utilizing its power to
link tables and potential data fields
required by various NECC programs.
The team then introduced individual
program sub-databases to corresponding
staff members at NECC via another round
of conference calls. After they approved
the recommendations and recognized the
ease and power of Webex compared to
their earlier mode of operations, the
team finalized work on Webex and created
another Powerpoint file that details
step-by-step procedures to use various
modules. The Powerpoint was deliberately
made extensively detailed so future
employees at NECC can train themselves
without any personal help.
Finally, the Dingman Center team
traveled to Millerton, NY on January 24,
2008 and visited NECC’s premises. The
team met with the staff members and
trained them on the overall capabilities
of Webex and also in detail on their
respective program modules. The training
was well received and the team answered
questions that NECC staff members had.
Overall, it was a great learning
experience for the team, not just in
database technologies but also in client
relationships and project management.
These skills and the knowledge gained
about the functioning of a non-profit
organization will certainly help the
team members during their MBA and in
their future endeavors.
Spring 2007 Projects
The Dingman Center Social Venture
Consulting program and its partner, Grassroots.org,
built upon its initial success by working with three
additional non-profits and six MBA student
consultants in spring 2007. The Social Venture Consulting program
exposes MBA students to the importance of community
service while giving them professional opportunities
to apply their MBA education in the real world.
Non-profit organizations benefit from the skill sets
of business focused volunteers with savvy approaches
to some common challenges of working with
non-profits.
This past semester, two
Grassroots' members, Byte Back and Road of Life,
joined another non-profit, Arts for Anyone, in the
Social Venturing program. Byte Back is a community
computer training center in Northeast Washington,
DC. It provides low-cost, hands-on computer training
to underserved, low-skilled, and underemployed
residents of the metropolitan Washington, DC area.
To grow its relationship with the surrounding
technology community, Sharon Bollers MBA/MPP ’08 and Rukhe
Aghomo
MBA ’08 ran a stakeholders survey, from soup to
nuts, to identify best practices for Byte Back for
building the essential relationships that would help
launch Byte Back’s students into the professional
world.
Road of Life’s mission is to
eradicate preventable cancers and other prevalent
diseases by educating children about the dangers of
tobacco use, the importance of regular physical
activity, and good nutrition. Laura Gonzalez MBA ’08
and Don Wood MBA ’08 created a business plan for how
Road of Life could sell its curriculum to create an
income stream to benefit its non-profit activities.
As Rob Emrich, Road of Life Founder, described, “Our
whole business model is geared around openness and
we needed someone to define parameters and create a
long-term, sustainable method of funding ourselves.”
Rob felt this experience was useful for non-profits
because “having those type of discussions and
critical analysis about your operations is always
important. How we can do things better and
differently, understanding the social and the
economic value of our work -- going through these
discussions with the help of the MBA students was
really, very valuable.”
Lastly, Arts for Anyone develops
arts-infused initiatives that use the arts to
educate and needed a marketing plan for their
website and publication materials. From this
experience, Laura Bennett MBA ’08 commented that, “I
was able to actually help an arts organization and
develop my marketing skills, which added to the
educational benefit of my MBA and gave me something
good to discuss in interviews for internships.” In
addition, Tekisha Harvey MBA ‘08, added that getting
client-face time was a great experience that I will
take along with me in my future endeavors, whether
they be consulting or not. It was also a great way
to put our academic learning into practice. Learning
to balance client needs with practical solutions was
an invaluable takeaway.”
