Master Class CSR in the Field
In this Booth course, students explore how social impact intersects with core business goals.
- By
- August 06, 2025
- Classroom Experience
It’s a perennial concern for companies: To be good corporate citizens, they have to balance taking actions for the benefit of society with turning a profit. Professor Caroline Grossman explains how her CSR social impact practicum enlists students in solving some of these real-world corporate responsibility challenges.
The Class: Corporate Social Responsibility Social Impact Practicum
Caroline Grossman, MBA ’03, adjunct associate professor of strategy and executive director of the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation
The Background
In 2018, Vanguard board member Mark Loughridge, MBA ’82, now board chair, approached Chicago Booth with a project for students involved with the Rustandy Center. The investment giant wanted to enlist Booth students to provide an assessment of disability inclusion and recommend best practices for fostering an inclusive environment and attracting and retaining people with disabilities.
I thought the project was a great opportunity to develop a lab course specifically focused on corporate social responsibility, and so we launched the practicum around it.
I’d had experience teaching another lab, the Global Social Impact Practicum. Students learn a lot from consulting with companies that coursework alone can’t provide, and the organizations benefit from their insights and talent. Creating this type of course comes with its challenges, but managing the moving pieces has become one of my superpowers.
We kept it small for the first year—10 students out of about 30 applicants—as a way of testing out the idea. The students completed two projects with Vanguard’s global head of diversity, equity, inclusion, and community stewardship.
It was a great success, and the course has grown from there. It centers around projects that allow students to consider the role of the firm in society by exploring corporate social responsibility; environmental, social, and governance concerns; sustainability; and more. Students who are pursuing Business, Society & Sustainability, one of Booth’s new concentrations, can take the course as part of their path to completing the concentration.
We’ve contributed to social impact projects at companies including Allstate, Hyatt, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, and WM. Former practicum students and Booth alums from DuPont and AB InBev/EverGrain Brewing came to me with ideas, and we worked on projects there too.
The lab currently enrolls almost double the number of students we had that first year, and we engage three companies per practicum—though I’d like to see that grow to five. Most ideas come to me through the Rustandy Center, where we have a pipeline of inbound projects, more and more of which are pitched by corporations. Business leaders reach out with social or environmental challenges at their companies that the center may be able to help with.
As is always the case with lab classes, the rate-limiting factor is projects: For it to work, you need great projects with strong corporate engagement.
The Approach
During the first week of class, I introduce three intersecting themes—teamwork, the role of the firm in society, and sustainability. In week two, clients come in to present to the whole class. Through coursework and theory, the students grapple with business questions and impact questions and the intersection of the two as it pertains to their projects.
The scope of every project demands that students leverage their learnings from other Booth courses—the fundamentals of economics, strategy, marketing, and finance. If a student does a superficial analysis, I push them to go deeper. If a financial model has holes, I point those out, and they redo it or start from scratch with a new approach.
The students learn from coaches who have domain expertise, such as Dave Friedman, MBA ’89, founder of AutonomyWorks; Melissa Hamilton, MBA ’15, a healthcare strategist; ESG expert Liz Michaels, AB ’88, MBA ’06 (XP-75); and Daphne Mazarakis, MBA ’99, an entrepreneur in food sustainability. The coaches and I also provide feedback on students’ final client presentations, the culmination of the course.
The Projects and Coursework
We work with Fortune 500 companies that are weighing core business and impact concerns. Last year, all three participants—Hyatt, Kraft Heinz, and WM—happened to bring projects focused on waste reduction, including recycling, recyclability of packaging, and food waste. The WM team specifically had students work on communication and engagement, looking at recycling behaviors and business opportunities.
We took a trip to the WM recycling facility and visited the Chicago headquarters of Kraft Heinz, where we heard from a number of leaders. A recent Kraft Heinz project involved looking at the company’s desserts portfolio—which includes Jell-O, Cool Whip, and Jet-Puffed—and identifying where Kraft Heinz could lean into brand-specific ESG and CSR initiatives in a bold way to benefit the business, its consumers, and the planet.
We also made field visits to Hyatt locations. At one hotel, students met with the director of events along with other leaders and team members, who talked about the split demands of running large-scale events—a key revenue driver—while honoring the company’s commitment to environmental issues such as waste reduction. I’m looking to get people out of the classroom and think about some of these questions firsthand.
At the same time, students were reading about recycling and corporate responsibility, along with Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson’s work on reimagining capitalism. I also teach the evolution of disclosures and sustainability standards so students can understand the regulatory environment.
The Takeaway
My hope for the course is that students develop a deeper understanding of how social impact intersects with core goals for a thriving business, what happens when the two don’t line up, how that’s complicated, and how you can reconcile them.
In a number of cases, I’ve heard anecdotally that the companies have incorporated student insights and often walk away with a nugget they otherwise would not have gotten. One client told us that the day after the students’ presentation, they were on a call with an internal group from another region and pulled up a student slide to show managers in that region. Students who end up working in corporate, in consulting, or in social impact all benefit from the course.
From the Students
Phil White, MBA ’25
Associate at McKinsey & Company
What drew me to the course was the opportunity to apply what I’ve learned at Booth to current environmental, social, and governance challenges at major firms. ESG initiatives are important for shareholders and for the stewardship of our planet, a message I learned to hone in this course.
My team helped WM reevaluate how they can influence people’s behavior when it comes to recycling. Our project journey was holistic. One day, we were “on the ground” in a local Chicago recycling facility sorting through bins and categorizing materials that people believed they could recycle. The next, we were analyzing sustainability reports and applying our collective team skills in marketing, psychology, and strategy to influence good recycling behavior.
Our presentation focused on ways WM could enhance its messaging to the general public. We also looked at where WM could seek out new business partnerships as well as how it could adapt to meet the needs of its current partners, major companies with evolving sustainability and ESG initiatives.
With increasing calls from shareholders and society for corporations to be responsible, this course is vital to the development of future business leaders. I thoroughly enjoyed working with my team and “learning by doing.”
Isra Hussain, MBA/MPP ’25
Partnerships consultant on the financial inclusion team at the World Bank
I took the course in 2024 and then was a TA in 2025. As a joint-degree MBA/MPP, I’m interested in cross-sector collaboration. Corporations and private businesses have an important role in that. I worked with Allstate’s charitable arm to raise awareness about the good work they do with grants and volunteer opportunities.
It was interesting to see a large corporation’s efforts to contribute to the community. One of the things I took away was that even if a corporation is doing good work, you may not necessarily know it, and there’s a lot of opportunity to align messaging and market the connection between the two areas of the business.
The class was a helpful introduction to CSR. Having this understanding of priorities and messaging in the private sector is important for relationship management. Now, in my role at the World Bank, I think about how different players—private and public—can help improve global financial inclusion.
From the Project Lead
Tara Hemmer
Chief sustainability officer of WM
We gave the team that worked on our project a clear mandate around recycling education. They stratified the audience, thinking about how you need to educate people differently—from the clear early adopters to those who want to do right but just need some guidance. The team also had great ideas about how to leverage social media as a resource to get messages out. Their final presentation was well done and thought-out, and they gave us advice with a lot of data behind it.
—As told to Deborah Lynn Blumberg