The CORPS Fellowship is a student-funded award for Columbia Business School students, allowing them to take summer jobs in the nonprofit or public sector. Established in 1992, the fellowship allows MBA students to contribute analytical and management skills to organizations that could not otherwise afford to hire them. MBA students provide these organizations with much-needed expertise in such areas as finance, strategic planning, marketing, management consulting and evaluation. In exchange, students get an opportunity to use the knowledge gained in business school in challenging and rewarding environments. In the summer of 2001, seven Columbia Business School students received CORPS Fellowships. Vishak Nathan CORPS fellowship funding allowed Vishak to intern in India with TIDE, a not-for-profit grassroots organization that believes in adapting and applying appropriate and relevant technologies to make a significant and positive impact on rural communities and non-traditional rural industries. His role at TIDE was to look at the experience with small capacity hydroelectric power generation and distribution systems and create new business and financing models by which the technology could be propagated on a much wider scale to other parts of India such as the Himalayas. What was the most challenging aspect of your internship? Getting to the project sites in the project and living in there in really rough accommodations. There are no paved roads to those isolated hamlets and the only way to reach most of the project sites was over boulder strewn mountain tracks on a four-wheel drive jeep. It could have been a scene straight out of a television commercial for Land Rover. In some cases, the terrain was so difficult that the jeeps could go only part of the way and we had to ford streams and hike through the mountains for a few miles to reach the project site. What was the most important lesson you learned from your internship? Sometimes established business models just do not solve the problems of a huge number of poor people in the world. Certain problems are better solved by alternate business models and technologies that are more relevant to the situation. Michael Clayton and Dieter Froeschl-Fenkart did their summer internships with the National Park Service’s Business Plan Initiative. Graduate students are assigned to putting together business plans and financial analyses for individual park units. Michael Clayton What was the most challenging aspect of your internship? Two other MBA students and I were tasked with estimating the costs for a National Park unit during its busiest time of the year. In addition to the normal interpretation and maintenance tasks required on most of Washington D.C.’s squares and monuments, the park was in the middle of organizing the Washington D.C. Fourth of July celebration ... as well as responding to calls from the White House. One of the greatest, and most enjoyable, challenges was trying to figure out just how the park operated ... from what it takes to keep the water running at the FDR Memorial to how many painters are needed in the White House. What is your funniest memory from the summer? As a result of my summer internship, I can tell you exactly how many memorials, fountains, flower gardens, park benches, water fountains, picnic tables, grills, trees and blades of grass exist in the Washington D.C. park system. Dieter Froeschl-Fenkart was assigned to Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. What was the most rewarding part of your experience? Seeing the look on the superintendent’s face and the faces of all the division chiefs as they began to understand more closely how under-funded they were and which areas of the park needed the most funding. It provided me with a sense of accomplishment and it hopefully made them better decision-makers. What was the most important lesson you learned from your internship? I sincerely believe that one of our goals on Earth should be to leave it in a better condition than how we entered it. And in that framework, I think we should all use our education to improve upon those things that call for improvement and that others are either too lazy to do or don’t have the ability to accomplish. Having a graduate degree is a special privilege ... we should use that privilege not to solely enrich ourselves, but more importantly to enrich those around us who never will have the privilege of attaining a graduate degree. Debra Carbonaro Debra interned at Fundacion Boliviana Para el Desarollo de la Mujer (FUNBODEM), an affiliate of Women’s World banking that engages in micro-lending in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. She worked with loan officers to conduct assessment interviews of loan applicants and was also involved in organizational assessment and restructuring. What was the most rewarding part of your experience? The most rewarding part was the people I met and helped when I was there ... amazing, amazing people with so much to offer and so little resources with which to offer it. They could never have paid so much to have someone come down so the CORPS fellowship was as great an investment for them as it was for me. What is your funniest memory from the summer? Let’s see.... was it when some insect bit me and made me so sick for a week that I couldn’t get out of bed? Or when I work up one morning to find ants all over my bed? Or when we drove 10 hours in a pick-up truck to collect loans and I wore all black and pretended to be from the World Bank? Does terrorizing a village count as funny? Or maybe when I went to a fancy upper class dinner and they served llama jerky and fried rice with a fried egg on top ... a delicacy of the region. No, really, my best memory was driving out to San Ignacio to collect loans ... we were four in this dirty dusty truck just listening to music and learning about one another. At night there was nothing to do so we drank local alcohol (pretty harsh stuff), sang karaoke and they tried to teach the gringa how to salsa. It’s amazing to see the commonalities and the differences when you throw four people together like that. You learn so much about yourself. Rachel Royal Through the CORPS fellowship Rachel worked last summer for the Robin Hood Foundation, a results-driven grant maker that applies investment principles to charitable giving to fight poverty in the five boroughs of New York City. Robin Hood provides both funding and management support to area nonprofits, focusing its grant making on education, early childhood, after-school and youth programs, and job training. Rachael worked with the Foundation’s internal nonprofit consulting team and performed an analysis of the nonprofit capital market. What was the most rewarding part of your experience? During my internship, I confirmed that the skills I obtained at Columbia Business School could be effectively applied in a nonprofit setting. For example, for one of my projects at the Foundation, I used skills from my finance and strategy classes to perform an analysis of the nonprofit capital market and to determine what barriers nonprofits face when attempting to access capital. From this I was able to recommend some new financial products (beyond grants) that Robin Hood could offer to grant recipients who needed loans or who will need loans in the future. My research was especially useful after September 11, when many of Robin Hood’s grantees had a dire need for new financing and technical assistance. What is your funniest memory from the summer? One of the most amusing parts of my summer was attending Robin Hood’s annual fund-raising benefit, which raised $13.5 million in one evening ... more than any other charitable benefit ever held in New York City. The benefit was attended by a number of CEOs and celebrities who participated in an auction during the event. The first auction prize included the following package of prizes: a private yoga class from Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow, a personal shopping spree with Christy Turlington, a private class on stress reduction from Deepak Chopra at his spa in California, a first-class flight and three days in a luxury hotel, and a medical assessment and treatments from the holistic doctor Frank Lipman ... and the other nine auction packages only got more spectacular from there! Mindy Cohen Mindy Cohen worked at New Profit Inc., a social venture capital fund, performing due diligence on prospective NPI portfolio organizations and developing strategic growth planning with Monitor consultants for the funded portfolio organizations. What was the most challenging part of your internship? Conducting traditional due diligence on an organization with a social mission. It’s much easier to evaluate a business that has one clear goal, such as maximizing shareholder returns. For the organizations that NPI funds, you have to look at traditional criteria that suggest a high potential business but also create a whole other set of criteria to assess potential for creating strong social returns. What was the most important lesson you learned from your internship? That business principles can be successfully applied to achieve a social goal. Many of these social entrepreneurs are people who finished graduate school recently with an idea and were able to use their skills and networks to do something positive. Mark Kleger Mark Kleger worked in the field of affordable housing at the Los Angeles Community Design Center (LACDC). “In many ways, I had a typical MBA summer experience. I performed financial analyses, negotiated deals, and drafted contracts. My employer was on the cutting-edge of its field. I was constantly engaged by my work and colleagues. However, in addition to these challenges, I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was helping to provide housing to low-income seniors and families.” What was the most rewarding part of your experience? The most rewarding part of the summer involved knowing that I was contributing to the lives of low-income families. Every person deserves a decent place to live but unfortunately many people go without adequate or safe shelter. By working in affordable housing, I knew that I was dramatically impacting the lives of families who would now have a safe and affordable home. We had one day where we built a “Kaboom” playground on one of our sites. This was a tangible experience that showed how the entire community came together around the homes and playground that we were building. It was very satisfying to realize how supportive and excited people were about our efforts. What was the most important lesson you learned from your internship? The most important lesson was that there are never enough resources for low-income communities. The organization where I worked was superior in many ways to other nonprofits I have seen, but still never seemed to have enough resources. It seems ludicrous not to have more resources placed in the hands of responsible organizations that could help thousands of families live with decency. You can give an organization more than just your money… you can give them an MBA for the summer. Giving to the CORPS fellowship helps increase the number of MBAs bringing their skill to the public and nonprofit sectors by reducing the financial barriers that discourage students from pursuing nonprofit internships. You can make a donation this week: contribute to a cluster gift, donate a day’s wages, or pledge another amount at the table in Uris Lobby! For more information about applying to be a CORPS Fellow (or about making donations), visit www.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise for more details and to download the application and guidelines.