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| Andrew Bishop |
One of the highlights of my life over the past several months has been the ongoing process of founding then building PhilanthroTeach (a non-profit organization focused on connecting the higher education community with the non-profit sector and meeting workforce development needs through education). The big picture here is this: social entrepreneurial ventures and non-profit organizations have been letting a major resource go untapped—Universities.
In the Nashville community alone there are several colleges filled with thousands of professors and students (undergraduate and graduate) who are willing to give back but just haven’t been asked. Non-profit executives are relentlessly looking for ways the community can collaborate and contribute to their various causes; they continuously seek the support of foundations, corporations, small businesses, and government. One name that you rarely hear on this list of potential donors (in this case, “in-kind” donations) is the universities, which in reality have much to offer especially when it comes to capacity building and organizational development.
Belmont University is a Nashville institution that prides itself on being community-centered. Many professors devote their entire semester’s class to going out and helping community organizations through their student’s course work. Specifically, each semester MBA students assemble in teams and select a local nonprofit, then complete an operation analysis to help build the organization’s infrastructure and develop detailed proposals highlighting recommendations that can be made to increase the efficiency of operations. The non-profit staff is invited to all of the final presentations after which they can ask questions to the students who developed the proposal and see demonstrations of how they can put these suggestions into practice. Another example is an undergraduate PR fundraising course that selects a local non-profit and throughout the semester builds a marketing and fundraising campaign that is functional for the organization at hand.
Recently a group of operation management students in the Belmont MBA program helped a local social entrepreneurial venture, FashionABLE, analyze their current operations and make recommendations for improvement. FashionABLE was started as a means of funding for the Women at Risk program in October of 2010. The organization buys hand crafted scarves from Ethiopian women and resells them across the United States, sending the profits back to Ethiopia to help these women out of lives of prostitution by giving them the education and skills necessary to find steady employment. Since their inception, FashionABLE has seen sales go through the roof, however they still had many of the same processes in place from their founding that were cost and time intensive. With the help of Belmont students, FashionABLE was given recommendations that could cut the time of processing orders in half as well as cost effective shipping and packaging solutions. Students also examined their inventory management systems (which were pretty much non-existent) and helped the organization to see efficient and effective methods to organize, sort, and track inventory.
Belmont is just one of the examples of universities that are doing this for local organizations; Vanderbilt’s Owen College of Management, Lipscomb and Trevecca’s Social Justice programs, and Tennessee State University all have very similar classes that seek to help organizations through scenarios mentioned above. However, it is up to the non-profits to reach out and ask for help. By building relationships with universities, the network of support can be extensive. Although it may not be a cash donation, the information and consultation from professors and students can keep a venture--especially a start up-- from having to hire costly consultants and overall improve the quality of their agency.
Use the universities to your advantage. They have many resources to offer, the only stipulation is that they must be asked. The schools of business are often a great place to start within the local universities. Non-profits are good at asking from foundations, corporations, and communities; colleges should be no different.
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