Wharton MBA Students Bring Expertise to Philadelphia Non-Profits Innovative Leadership Program Trains Students for Organization Boards
“I have always been involved with the communities I live in,” says Wharton MBA student Franco Tapia, WG’06, “and when I heard about the NBLP program, I immediately thought it would be a great fit. The ability to use Wharton’s resources to help the greater Philadelphia community is something I’m proud to be a part of.”
In April 2005, Wharton’s Social Impact Management Initiative launched a unique program called the Nonprofit Board Leadership Program (NPBLP). Working with the Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University, the NPBLP selects and trains ten Wharton MBA students to serve on the Boards of Directors of nonprofit organizations in Philadelphia.
MBA students placed through the NPBLP use their high-level knowledge of such areas as accounting, finance, and marketing to make a direct impact on the business strategies of organizations in the community around them.
MBA Students Learn While Making a Difference
NPBLP’s first group of participants was selected from over 50 applicants, on the basis of their professional experience, commitment to community service, and vision for what they hope to gain from participating in the program.
Program participants will attend board meetings, serve on a board sub-committee, and receive one-on-one mentorship from a senior board member. They will also take part in quarterly development sessions, where they work with experts to find potential solutions for the challenges they face in their board positions.
“These partnerships will benefit organizations and communities that typically do not have access to MBA talent,” says Sadaf Kazmi, WG’06, the program’s student director. “The most salient difference” between the non-profit and for-profit environments, explains Gautam Mishra, WG’06, “is the dependence on external sources of funds. Consequently, these organizations sometimes have a lot less power than their corporate counterparts.
“Over the course of the next semester,” reports Mishra, who’s working with Philadelphia’s Arts & Spirituality Center, “I plan to focus on providing a framework for increased transparency in what is currently a start-up-like environment.”
This year's NPBLP participants and their organizations are:
Nicole Casciello – Alice Paul Institute
Sung-Min Chung – The Food Trust
Christopher Donohue – Empowerment Group
Bryce Goodwin – Mazzoni Center
Marina Hervy – Metropolitan Career Center
Alan Hsu – White-Williams Scholars
Gautam Mishra – Arts & Spirituality Center
Yogesh Patel – Strings for Schools
Due Quach – Philadelphia Mural Arts Program
Franco Tapia – Children's Aid Society of Pennsylvania.
“We look forward to opening up the program to a larger number of students in the class of 2007 and eventually to other graduate students within the university,” reports Kazmi. “We hope that these partnerships will help increase the visibility of NPBLP within Wharton and around Philadelphia.”
Wharton Takes the Lead in Social Impact Management
The Wharton Social Impact Management Initiative (SIM), which created the NPBLP, brings together all the intellectual efforts, across the university, to find entrepreneurial approaches to social problems. As an umbrella organization, SIM aligns faculty, students, and external organizations to offer insight into innovative ways that public or private enterprises can find effective solutions for social issues.
For social entrepreneurs, doing good and making money are not mutually exclusive. In the words of Wharton professor Ian MacMillan, Fred R. Sullivan Professor of Management and Director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center: “It’s a process whereby the creation of new business enterprise leads to social wealth enhancement so that both society and the entrepreneur benefit.”
“There is no reason,” he adds, “why imaginative entrepreneurs can’t enhance social wealth and also generate fortunes for themselves,” adding that he sees social entrepreneurship in many cases as “an alternative to governments undertaking the task of solving societal problems.”
Wharton has been a leader in exploring new approaches to social entrepreneurship, with such initiatives as an annual day-long conference on Social Impact Management and a new course on “Entrepreneurship and Societal Wealth Generation,” which aims to teach students that “many social problems, if looked at through an entrepreneurial lens, create opportunity for someone to launch a venture that generates profits by alleviating that social problem.”
The course takes a hands-on approach, requiring student groups to develop their own business venture plans, which will ideally become real-world businesses. In addition, Wharton students considering social entrepreneurship can access the SIM-sponsored Wharton Net Impact. Founded as Students for Responsible Business in 1993, Net Impact aims to promote social impact careers among the Wharton MBA community, in such key areas as social enterprise, nonprofit management, international and economic development, socially responsible investing, and corporate social responsibility.
