Students Help Social Ventures Expand

How Choosing Affects Customer Satisfaction

Courtesy of Growing Home

Published: February 1, 2007

Following the advice of Chicago GSB students,Chicago city officials gave $200,000 each to three nonprofit organizations to help them develop a revenue-generating arm.All three organizations hire or find full-time work for ex-convicts: Goodwill Industries ofMetropolitan Chicago's janitorial services; Pivotal Staffing Services, a temporary staffing agency; and Growing Home, an urban garden whose produce is sold at farmer's markets and to restaurants.

Last spring, Linda Darragh, adjunct associate professor of entrepreneurship and director of entrepreneurship programs at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship, included nonprofit options in the New Venture and Small Enterprise Lab, in which students work with senior managers at early-stage companies to solve real problems. The Mayor's Office of Workforce Development (OWD), looking for outside input, called Chicago GSB, Darragh said. "Social service agencies run on government and foundation grants, but government funding has slowed down, and foundations like to seed projects to get them going but don't provide operating dollars for the future," she said. "One of the big movements is to develop social enterprise ventures with a revenuegenerating arm that will support the mission of the nonprofit."

Eight students picked the nonprofits and wrote financial, marketing, and human resources plans to help the organizations expand profitably. Second-year student Dequiana Brooks opted for a nonprofit because she wanted to work for a company with financial and socially responsible goals. "The Safer Foundation, which backs Pivotal, has a strong history of helping ex-offenders reintegrate into society," she said."By helping Pivotal develop an optimal marketing mix and an organization plan for its business, I added to the higher goal of setting these ex-offenders up for a successful life after prison."

The OWD accepted the recommendations in June and asked the GSB to tackle the problem for other nonprofits during the winter quarter. Darragh said,"These projects allow our students to see what social entrepreneurship entails. Even the students who aren't interested in it can see the similarities with the for-profit world."-P.H.