For Food and Profit: The Community Servings Project
by
By Kate Greene, SOM’06
Earlier this year, Community Servings, a Boston-based nonprofit serving meals to the critically ill, contacted my nonprofit consulting firm, TDC, for help with a prospective earned income venture. In the midst of building a new facility that would double its capacity to make meals, the senior staff wanted to know if there was a viable market for selling meals wholesale to other nonprofits, such as charter schools and senior centers.
This was an exciting project for me to take on—the chance to work with an entrepreneurial human services organization to develop a business plan. At SOM, I had worked on similar projects through the Yale-Goldman Sachs business planning competition and learned about earned income ventures through Sharon Oster’s Strategic Management of Nonprofits course, but I could now apply these skills as a professional, post-MBA consultant.
I spent my summer in Washington, DC, at PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in the Ventures division, which focuses on how to add incremental revenue to the bottom line. I completed a strategy for the creation of a business development unit, a competitive analysis of online kids games, recommendations for the forecasting of bandwidth use, and business process requirements for the implementation of a film editing software. I learned about a whole new industry (public television), was given a lot of independence to work on my projects, and had a sense of ownership and pride about what I completed. My supervisor was great; he made sure to keep in touch on what I was doing, was enthusiastic about the work that I did, and worked hard to make sure that my work was substantive and MBA-level.
This summer I am working as an Associate in the Corporate Finance group at Airtricity Holdings (AHL). AHL’s core business is both the development and construction of wind energy projects and the generation and retailing of renewable electricity. I worked on the financing of a $252 MM (126.5 MW) wind power plant in TX and the recapitalization of a 90 MW distressed project. I really enjoyed working for a small but growing company which gave me the opportunity to work on many different aspects of the business.
Amy Karson and I worked this summer to launch a social venture that provides business process services to the non-profit industry. Last Spring 22 first-year Yale MBA students worked with us to prepare a full business plan. Our goal for the summer was to use this plan to raise the necessary capital to launch this business upon graduation. After the 13th investor told us that they liked the idea but that they were a little nervous about selling to non-profits, we decided to change our strategy and come back to the investors after we had a few clients. Therefore, we spent the second half of the summer pitching to clients instead of investors. We met with 30+ non-profits in Boise, the Greater Yellowstone Area, and the Greater NYC area. Over twenty asked for proposals, but since we weren’t actually fully operational, we only sent out three. One firm accepted and we now have our first client right here in our very own New Haven.
I worked at Cherokee Investment Fund, a $1.2b private equity fund, the company’s 4th. The fund buys large, generally urban brownfields (contaminated real estate), indemnifies the sellers against legal action, remediates the property, re-entitles it for high-density mixed uses, and sells the property to vertical developers, often with covenants requiring green building and other sustainable development features. I had three roles: 1) I worked as an associate on due diligence (market studies, residual analysis, financial modeling), 2) I worked on two internal consulting projects — tabulating the firm’s carbon footprint according to EPA Climate Leaders standards, and also putting metrics to the company’s commitment to environmental, social, and financial sustainability, and 3) I worked for the company’s private operating foundation (global orphan care) to establish a revenue stream that would make the foundation financially independent.
This summer, I worked for the Calvert Foundation’s Lending and Advisory Services Team as a Summer Associate. The Foundation serves as a non-profit financial intermediary that provides investors with innovative financial products that channel affordable capital to underserved communities around the world. If I had to summarize my internship in one sentence, I would say that I assisted in managing the lending side of a $110 million portfolio that consists of non-profit organizations around the world with a social mission. I worked on a range of projects including doing the due diligence, credit and risk analysis for a number of potential borrower non-profits, updating the Foundation’s risk management framework and analyzing (in both qualitative and quantitative terms) the social impact our investments were generating. I absolutely loved working with my team, which consisted of Investment Officers and the Director of Lending and Advisory Services. The range of projects I worked on and the level of responsibility I was given to manage these projects as well as my own time were invaluable parts of the internship.
This summer I worked at Echoing Green, a social Venture Capital fund that invests in entrepreneurial organizations with a social mission. As an intern in the strategy department, I worked on Echoing Green’s strategic plan, and also helped it evaluate the impact of its investments. The staff was great and gave me free reign to “create my own experience,†but I also really enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about social entrepreneurship and investing.
This summer I worked at TDC, a nonprofit consulting firm in Boston. TDC provides strategy, management, and financial consulting to many nonprofits in the United States. During my internship, I worked with eight clients, including foundations, city agencies, a social service nonprofit, and arts and culture organizations. Some of my projects included creating a business plan for an earned income venture, feasibility studies, and benchmarking studies. I loved the fast paced nature of consulting work, and that I could really use the skills that I have learned at SOM to help my nonprofit clients.
Christian Community Action is an ecumenical social service organization that expresses faithful witness through providing emergency food, housing and support to those who are poor in New Haven, encouraging their efforts to attain self-sufficiency and working to change systems that perpetuate poverty and injustice. In 2003, CCA launched PIVOT, a job skills straining program that places ad funds members of their constituency into apprenticeships at New Haven companies, to help endow them with important job skills, and to launch them into stable job tracks.
Since Yale SOM began, we have always had opportunities for students to work with outside organizations while still in school. In theory, these workshop experiences, as we sometimes term them, are a win-win venture. Students gain the benefits of learning how to apply their new-found skills in real world settings while helping deserving organizations, often in the nonprofit or small business setting, while those same organizations get the benefit of pro bono work by a bright group of soon-to-be expensive MBA students. The lure of this value proposition both for students and for community organizations has led SOM, along with many other MBA programs, to offer these opportunities.