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.

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By Ivy Washington, SOM’09

On October 29 through 31, more than ninety child welfare professionals from all over the country gathered in the GM Room to create plans to optimize systems in government agencies with the support of non-profits and for-profits to improve the efficiency of human services. Daniel Stein, SOM’87, co-founder of Stewards of Change, the organization that arranged this conference, attended his 20th SOM reunion in October and was delighted to be holding this third annual conference at SOM.

This year’s conference was called InterOptimability: Human Services 2.0: Preparing Child Welfare for the 21st Century. Mr. Stein’s opening remarks on Monday set the tone of thinking broadly about possibilities and about commonalities by noting the presence of representatives from disparate groups including practitioners, policy-makers, think tanks, and technology businesses.

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I served as a programming and development intern at Empower New Haven. Empower New Haven is the fiduciary for HUD (Housing and Urban Development) funds disbursed into the New Haven Empowerment Zone. The organization runs programs and disburses grant money in the following areas: housing, home ownership, workforce development, ex-offender rehabilitation, youth empowerment, adult education, and non-profit organization capacity building.

As the President/CEO’s intern, I worked on or coordinated several high-profile projects such as the Summer Neighborhood Grants, initiated the EZ Impact Evaluation Initiative, and researched the Brother to Brother and Sister to Sister youth mentoring initiatives. Additionally, I coordinated a joint Empower New Haven/Habitat for Humanity of Greater New Haven refresher credit class for current homeowners to review the pitfalls of refinancing, avoiding foreclosure, and how to improve your credit. At the end of my internship, I was asked to stay on at the organization, part-time, as their new Director of Program Analysis & Development.

More about Empower New Haven »
More 2007 Summer Internships »

By Kendra Lee, SOM’08

Located in New Haven, Farnam Neighborhood House is a “home away from home” for many children in the community and provides recreational and educational facilities to children, teenagers, adults and families.

As a client of the Outreach program this year, FNH was interested in developing an alumni association and asked the Outreach team for assistance in getting the program started. The goal of the project was to create a sustainable program that would benefit the alumni and the children at Farnam. Once the Outreach team confirmed that it was feasible to develop an alumni association, they worked on a strategic plan to help Farnam create, market, and implement a variety of activities to start the program. On April 26, the Outreach team successfully presented their final ideas to the Executive Director and two board members of Farnam Neighborhood House.

Each year, the Community Service Club coordinates with FNH to help clean up Camp Farnam and get it ready for summer reopening. This was the (fourth or fifth) year that members of the club and SOM staff members trekked out to Durham, CT. April 27th was a rainy day, but students and staff successfully helped to clean cabins, recreation centers, and other camp spaces, ending the day with hot coffee and a barbeque lunch.

Read more about Farnam Neighborhood House.

By Fawzia Ahmed, SOM’07

The Program on Social Enterprise collaborated with Stewards of Change (co-founded by Daniel Stein, SOM ’87) to co-host a conference for child welfare professionals, “Technological Innovation: Creating the New Child Welfare Business Model.” The theme of this year’s conference, which took place at the Yale School of Management from November 13th to 15th, focused specifically on technological innovations that could be applied to improving child welfare services and outcomes.

Speakers spanned multiple sectors with the expectation that technologies used in other areas, such as in healthcare, education or the courts, could spur ideas for uses in child welfare. Panel participants included: Terrie Gray from Pearson Learning and PowerSchools, who discussed innovations in K-12 student information systems; Phil Longman from the New America Foundation, who discussed the development of medical records in the Veterans Administration hospitals; and David Schwartz from Q-linx, Inc., who discussed neural networks and their applicability in predictive analytics to assist in identifying children at risk.

Yale SOM professors also gave talks helping to spur ideas. Barry Nalebuff ran a session on creative problem solving, based on his book Why Not?, while Sharon Oster discussed technological innovations across sectors, and K. Sudhir talked about the uses of predictive analytics in marketing.

By the end of the conference, participants had drawn up long lists of ideas on poster boards surrounding the GM Room at the Yale School of Management. These ideas were the culmination of brainstorming sessions in which they debated how to import and adapt technological innovations for child welfare. Stewards of Change will use these ideas as a springboard for further research, and the professionals involved in the conference will take them back to their agencies.

More about Stewards of Change