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What did you do on your summer vacation? Revitalize the tourism industry in Croatia and privatize a shipyard in Latvia as Amy Cogan did with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London? Or maybe you promoted economic development in the D.C. Deputy Mayor's Office for Planning and Economic Development, with Alex Nyhan. If you were Martha Velando, you spent the summer conducting research for the International Institute of the East Bay in Oakland, California, working toward its mission of being a resource for immigrants and refugees trying to achieve self-sufficiency.
Cogan, Nyhan, and Velando are three of forty-five MBA students participating in this year's Harvard Business School Nonprofit and Public Management Summer Fellowship program. The program, sponsored by the HBS Initiative on Social Enterprise, founded in 1982, has placed over 350 interns in national and international nonprofits including The Boston Children's Museum, the International Rescue Committee, The Nature Conservancy, Ford Foundation West Africa, Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, and The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Participants explore alternatives to more typical management jobs.
The Fellowship Program has three goals:
- To enable students to take jobs in nonprofit and public enterprises where their HBS training will provide significant benefits to the organization and the community it serves;
- To expose students to the rewards and challenges of public and nonprofit management;
- To enrich the HBS community and the quality of the MBA education by increasing the number of students with experience in the nonprofit and public sectors.
What's it like to work in one of these internships? How does it prepare HBS students to make a difference in the nonprofit sector? Working Knowledge spoke with Alex Nyhan (MBA 2002) about his experience.
Nyhan was drawn to his internship for personal and business reasons. His role, as a consultant to the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development in the District of Columbia, is part of a new office under D.C. Mayor Tony Williams. Nyhan heard Williams speak at an HBS/KSG Social Enterprise Conference and remembered how excited he was about the Williams administration—he had lived in DC prior to entering HBS.
"I'm interested in this office because it is new, and is trying to establish a role as an effective intermediary solving the market failures in DC that have historically prevented good deals and investment in the community from occurring as often as they should have," said Nyhan. "The Tony Williams administration is making a major push to be more business-friendly and a big mandate is challenging an entrenched city bureaucracy to start thinking more strategically about its proper role, performance, and accountability."
While much of the general classwork in Nyhan's first year was helpful background for his internship, his Leadership and Organizational Behavior class (LEAD), which focuses on linking effective managerial skills to the human side of business, informed his experience, he said. Most pertinent, though, was University Professor Michael Porter's work on inner-city development.
Porter's work, including the Harvard Business Review article "The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City," and The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC)'s "2nd Annual Inner-City Shopper Survey: Inner-City Shoppers Make Cents (and Dollars)" established the framework for thinking about inner-city commerce in a new way.
Nyhan said more work is needed to estimate the importance of reaching out to community residents who have traditionally been excluded.
Lessons learned
Some might argue that an internship is only as good as the lessons it provides. The Deputy Mayor's office where Nyhan worked offered a number of valuable lessons.
First lesson: "Simple, boring remedies are incredibly important and powerful," said Nyhan. Enabling a 50 percent increase in the number of small businesses using accounting software would be a "massive achievement," he said, since currently many small businesspeople are leery of interacting with city bureaucracy.
Second, Nyhan got a first-hand look at some of the flaws inherent in running government like a business. In the case of D.C. government, the city's four Deputy Mayors have a lot of power and a good deal of autonomy, but they lack the authority to "hire and fire," explained Nyhan. Without this power, the government/business parallel breaks down, which can "paralyze and challenge" the structure.
Finally, Nyhan has become aware of the "massive entrepreneurial opportunity" to solve market failures in the inner city. "The cash economy is hugely underestimated in inner-city neighborhoods," said Nyhan. This is an under-served market that remains largely untapped, he said.
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Intern Takes
Carla Tishler, Managing Editor, HBS Working Knowedge caught up with Martha Velando and Amy Cogan(both MBA 2002) about their experiences. Velando is an intern with the International Institute of the East Bay, a 75-year-old organization that deals with multicultural issues. Many American cities have International Institutes, including Boston—each helps the local population based on the needs of its client base. Cogan works for The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which was established in 1991 to help central and eastern Europe Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries transition toward open market-oriented economies.
Tishler: What drew you to this internship?
Velando: I got interested in the internship for several reasons. I had participated in a joint program with CARE Peru while studying Business in La Universidad del Pacifico, Lima, and realized the tremendous potential contributions that we business students, can give to this sector…this kind of work gave me an opportunity to feel good about the work I did, since I knew the final output was going to help people in real need.
Also, IIEB works with multi-cultural people. Since I was the International Representative of my section [at HBS] I became acquainted with some of the difficulties people have in accepting/understanding other people because of their cultural differences—I was interested in working in this arena in my internship.
The most important lesson I have learned in my internship is that immigration in the United States is a growing reality, sometimes not well understood. People pursuing immigration to other countries are doing so under dramatic circumstances (i.e. extreme violence, politic persecution, economic collapse). Given that, they are willing to leave their cultures and families in the hope of finding a better future. Sometimes, people try to find "guilty parties" in this issue. I think immigration is the consequence of unequal living conditions among nations and humanity's desire to have a better quality of life
Cogan: Immediately prior to enrolling at HBS, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. For two years, I worked with a newly established, locally run financial institution providing loans to the agricultural sector. The experience was extremely challenging, but also very rewarding and offered me the opportunity to gain a grassroots perspective of the challenges to economic development in one of the poorest areas of the region. I see my internship with EBRD as an opportunity to balance my community-level experience with a broader, economy-wide perspective.
This internship seemed to me to be an excellent way to apply both my Peace Corps experience and the business skills I am developing at HBS. I wanted to challenge what I have learned in business school by changing assumptions of well-functioning markets and stable macroeconomic and political environments and explore how what I am learning at HBS can be applied to a developing country/transition economy setting.