Current MBA students donated close to $60,000 to the Columbia Outreach Programs (CORPS) Fellowships, helping to sponsor 14 of their peers in summer internships at nonprofit and public-sector organizations around the world.

The CORPS fellowships — funded entirely by the School community — enable students to work at nonprofit organizations at salaries more closely aligned with typical MBA internships

The 2006 fellows will work across the nonprofit spectrum at such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, the United Nations Development Programme and EcoLogic Finance, a nonprofit that provides financial services to community businesses in Latin America and Africa.

“This is a unique opportunity to be involved in the business of economic development,” says Christian Lee ’07, who will intern at the Acap Development Trust in Kabul, a private nonprofit equity fund that is working to renew Afghanistan’s private sector. Lee will provide assistance to local businesses, help structure investment opportunities and evaluate requests for grants.

Rachel Albert MBA/MSW ’07 already started her internship at the New York City Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, where she will propose ways to improve the quality of care for Alzheimer patients.

“I expect to learn a lot from this project because it’s really at the intersection of several major trends in health care: caring for the rapidly aging population, escalating problems with Medicaid and Medicare and the high cost of long-term care,” says Albert.

“Nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations are increasingly seeing the value in people who have skills in finance, marketing and operations,” says Carolyn Champ, associate director of the Social Enterprise Program, which administers the fellowships.

The Social Enterprise Club coordinates student fund-raising for the CORPS, with assistance from the Committee on Volunteering and Philanthropy (COVAP) and the Graduate Business Association (GBA). This year, the collaborative effort raised a total of $60,445, the second-largest amount in the program’s 15-year history. 

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