Ready, Refresh, Reset: A Summer in Education

We all have heard (and experienced) how different the job market and career paths are today as compared to that of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Almost everything has changed. In high school and college, pivotal years in determining “what you want to do with the rest of your life,” I cannot count how many times friends, colleagues, and family members told me that “figuring out what you want to do is the hardest part of starting your career.” I used to take this at face value. These are smart people, my closest friends, those that know me best. Plus, it makes sense. Making such a big decision, a choice to pursue a certain career path in a particular industry, is undoubtedly life-changing, and something that generations of past just did and never looked back.

But it’s not true.

I was surprised to find myself thinking about this daily during the first part of my summer internship. See, to me, what actually matters is staying connected to the WHY, not losing sight of the emotional drive that leads to decisions.

This has hit me from a lot of angles this year, and especially this summer. Applying to business school is quite the task: stressful, detailed, requires certainty. And then you are accepted and swept up in the excitement of going back to school, being able to sleep in on a weekday, and finding new friends. And then things get tough. Group projects, exams, late nights, working on the weekends. During these less-than-stellar times, it is easy to question what you are doing. Why did I willingly decide to pay more than I would like to admit to go back to school in my late 20s? I fought off this questioning for a year and managed to carry on just fine.

But then my internship with Inspiring Capital brought me back to reconnecting with who I am and why I have made the decisions I have. Inspiring Capital provides training programs and consulting services to help organizations pursue profits and purpose together. This summer, we have a group of 18 MBA fellows and 7 undergraduate interns, all paired with a nonprofit organization for a 10-week consulting project. Before I get into my actual project assignment work, it is important to note the impact that Inspiring Capital alone has had on my journey. Being around others equally as motivated to do good business is inspiring, but we were challenged to go even further to dig deep into our “why.” After identifying what attracts our heads and hearts, the team challenged us to think creatively about how we can appease both of these criteria. Most of the summer fellows are graduate students that have already made the choice to pursue a career pivot. But in the chaos of a summer internship in NYC, what we have all pushed aside is why we chose to do this. Being asked to write down what we love, what skills we have, and how we want to marry those things together was incredibly reinvigorating simply because, as I mapped out the literal words, I found that I am on track.

Cue: relief.

The hardest part is not making the decision to make a change, it is being able to keep the reason you had to make a change at your core. It is: remembering why.

This personal journey has been refreshing, and has come at the perfect time. Not only for me, but for my client as well. This summer, through Inspiring Capital, I am working with Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), an educational nonprofit in NYC that provides free academic programming, career counseling, and internship search support to low-income and underrepresented high school students and young professionals. Their four programs (Scholars, Career, Law, Alternative Investments) have been incredibly powerful and have propelled SEO to be one of the most successful and largest educational support institutions in the area. SEO is entirely funded through donations and recently received such a large increase in funding that they doubled the number of students they support, and set a goal to double service again in the next five to ten years. Incredible!

The less-than-rosy side of this equation is that internal organizational and operational infrastructure has not changed since business has expanded and the organization is not poised to accommodate or sustain such growth. Employees are strained and overworked; the lack of process, inadequate staffing, and inefficient, manual execution methods only make morale worse and further reduce the possibility of hitting deadlines. I interviewed numerous employees in different departments and at different levels, and they all wanted one thing: to get back to why they are there. Employees do not work at SEO for the money or the title; they work there for the mission. The passion. The message. They want to get back to remembering that, to feeling that every day, and not being bogged down by process, policy and execution. Now I am also inspired to help them refresh and reset. They are ready for it, and Inspiring Capital is going to help them get there.

There are logical decisions and there are emotional decisions and sometimes those criteria merge together, and those are the most powerful decisions. They make sense and they mean something. They are strong not because of their rationality, but because they are intrinsically important, evoking a visceral response as well. This is what matters. And this is what I have reconnected with this summer through Inspiring Capital and SEO. I am so thankful for this opportunity to help others get to the same place.

My internship is wrapping up in just a few weeks. Much more to come at that time regarding my actual assignment work including assessment, strategy, deliverables, and challenges. I am so energized about these next few weeks and am thankful that Inspiring Capital has given me the opportunity to work with the humbling SEO to improve their operations so they can continue to improve others’ lives.

-Candice Arner, MBA 2019

In the Belly of the Bureaucracy

When I first learned from Education Pioneers that I would be placed this summer with the New York City Department of Education (DoE), an organization oft noted for its immense bureacracy, my mind immediately wandered to this iconic scene from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. 

I had never worked in an organization so massive and wondered if I would be swallowed whole by paperwork or run ragged by process and red tape (which I pictured as the large ball of red tape that chases families through the airport in the Southwest Airlines commercial). More substantively, though, I began to question how I might be able to impact a school system that serves 1.1 million students and employs nearly 135,000 people during a single ten-week period.

The projects to which I have been assigned involve evaluating two separate programs that the DoE has launched in the last two years. One is related to the DoE’s move to adopt the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) and the other to a program designed to help recognize rigorous courses in high schools. While I remain uncertain how much impact I can achieve in this timeframe, I can say that much has surprised me during my summer thus far.

First, my notions of bureaucracy have been challenged. While it’s true that the organizational chart for the department I am felt more like the documented family tree of a Mayflower descendant (particularly by the time you got down to where I might fall), I have been blown away by the dedication of those with whom I work. Growing up in a family of educators, I have been privy to many conversations about the severe disconnectedness and occasional ambivalence of district administrators toward the ramifications their decisions have on teachers and students.  And while I am sure that the sentiment may hold true for some administrators (as well as many throughout the working world), here I am sitting in the halls steps away from the Chancellor’s office with tireless individuals encouraging more contact with schools and heatedly debating the impact of each decision they make. Ultimately, there’s an energy and passion that I didn’t know if I’d find in the halls of the Tweed Courthouse, home to some of the central district’s offices.

However, I cannot say that my experiences working on behalf of the massive organization have been perfectly rosy. I can say truthfully that I was surprised when I was given this placement for my fellowship. I applied to Business School with the notion of attempting to work in the education sector as an entrepreneur, working on the ground level where I can hopefully see the impact that I make on a day-to-day basis. To be so far removed from what’s happening to students is difficult. The projects on which I’m working very much operate from the central premise of incentivizing positive behaviors from schools and teachers on behalf of students, making it difficult to gauge how successful the incentives are.  And what’s more, the district struggles with how to measure those changes, though they are attempting to make strides in this area. Conversations around measurement of goals is difficult because the goals are many while the mechanisms and capacity to measure are few, which is a far cry from the B-school classrooms I left in May.

Additionally, though the amount of work undertaken can be monumental in such a large system, the pace at which change can occur is slow given its bureaucratic nature.  Much of the consulting work I’ve done through Stern thus far has been with startups on behalf of our Entrepreneur’s Exchange Club, where a good idea can be passed along and adopted nearly instantaneously. While there are downsides to the pace of the startup environment as well, it’s frustrating to have to untangle the web of relationships necessary to complete a task, particularly when time is the only component of my experience that is fixed (let’s just say that 10 weeks ain’t much).

And so, here I sit, a few weeks in, hoping that I will be able to find a way to define my impact at the end of the summer. My experience thus far has shaped my perspective on the commitment of the bureaucrats who are able to find significant motivation to try to improve public education in New York City inside of a complex behemoth that may not be designed to deliver change most effectively. Yet, at the same time, the reach of the organization makes the potential for impact so great, and serves as the counterargument to my desire to become an education entrepreneur, which asks the question, “where can I have the greatest impact?” The answer may seem obvious, but the remainder of my summer is not only about seeing what the answer to that question is, but exploring whether that’s the right question to ask about the type of impact I hope to have in education.

In the meantime, I’ll be the guy humming this tune. 

–Ken Herrera

Social Finance in Action…in Jersey

Allow me to begin this post by shamelessly name-dropping: HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan; Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy; Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Richard E. Constable, III; Senator Sandra B. Cunningham; Jersey City Councilwoman Viola Richardson; Executive Director of the NJ Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency Anthony L. Marchetta; and Hot 97’s DJ Wallah…  All people I’ve had a chance to interact with in a few short weeks at conferences, ground-breakings, and ribbon-cuttings.  As I wrap up my fifth week at New Jersey Community Capital (NJCC), I can’t believe how time has flown and this company that I’ve found myself in.  The community development finance industry is, by necessity, a collaboration between various parties and stakeholders; public, private, non-profit, and for-profit.  It takes a combination of financial acumen, mission focus, and public support to succeed.  It is this synthesis of complex financial transactions and tangible social impact that attracted me to the field for my summer internship.

NJCC is the only New Jersey-based Community Loan Fund that operates throughout the entire state and, as such, the organization is involved in some of the most diverse and exciting community development projects in the state.  We provide financial services to affordable housing developers, charter schools, and other social service organizations.  This is usually in the form of real-estate collateralized loans, but includes pre-development financing, lines of credit, and working capital.  The Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) industry is very interesting, and what I would consider a social enterprise.  While NJCC is a not-for-profit organization, its lending activities are expected to be profitable and the deal structures are often more complex than traditional commercial banking due to the government subsidies, guarantees, and tax credits involved.  It is a great example of using finance as a tool to create a positive social impact.

In addition to underwriting new loans, I am helping the lending team with various projects such as unwinding New Markets Tax Credit deals, replacing the legacy loan servicing application, and establishing a new fund with a focus on comprehensive neighborhood stabilization.  It has been a functional combination of consulting and finance that has given me some great experience but also allowed me to directly contribute to the firm’s community development activities.

One of my favorite projects thus far is only about a mile west of my apartment in Jersey City; the All Saints School rehabilitation.  A four-story red brick building that was built in 1897; the school has stood vacant for over ten years and is going to be converted into 21 “emerging market” apartments and 4 affordable housing apartments.  With excess amounts of interior space, interesting architectural details, and views of the Statue of Liberty and downtown Manhattan, this building will be the cornerstone of a turnaround in the Lafayette neighborhood.  Lafayette is located in a part of Jersey City that has tons of potential: it is close to public transportation to New York City and is right next to Liberty State Park.  However, the area suffered over the latter half of the twentieth century from the steady decline in manufacturing and industrial jobs in Jersey City, which brought along with it rising crime and poverty rates.  Now, the neighborhood is poised to reinvent itself as a more livable area for its residents.  Because it is being built to supply affordable housing, unlike many projects in the area, the rehabilitation of the All Saints School is not an extension of the nearby gentrification along the Hudson River coastline but rather a rebirth of the community from the inside-out.

–Adam Day

Lili’s InVenture Starts

I first heard about InVenture through my StartingBloc network of young social entrepreneurs. At a mixer after StartingBloc’s Los Angeles Institute, I met Shivani Siroya, CEO of InVenture and LiAnn Ishizuka, Marketing and PR, and discussed briefly what InVenture was about. At that time InVenture was piloting its beta version of crowd funding impact investment platform. Now, about a year later, InVenture has evolved into a tech focused firm aimed at helping entrepreneurs do away with paper and pencil accounting and embrace mobile technology to store critical financial data.

InVenture is not afraid to think and dream big – we are in the midst of creative madness, exploring how to help over 400 million struggling entrepreneurs in India create credit history [1]and ultimately enter the $1+ trillion in global financing industry [2]through its SMS accounting tool, InSight.  This cross section of microfinance, mobile technology, and social mission of creating financial access for the unbanked is what drew me to InVenture.  My background as a software developer and special interest in learning about microfinance and how social ventures can scale up motivated me to pursue an MBA at NYU Stern School of Business.

NYU Stern + InVenture => Big dreams of impact

After securing a Social Impact Fund Fellowship from NYU Stern this summer, I jumped on plane from the East Coast eager to join the InVenture team in the West Coast office to learn firsthand about this fascinating business model. This summer I will apply my personal mix of software engineering experience, business education, and commitment to global social impact initiatives as an InVenture Fellow focusing on business development and strategy.

Just like InVenture, I am not afraid to think and dream big! At the end of June, I will depart to India to rollout the InSight India sales strategy at a crucial operational time. I am excited about the opportunity to create value for aspiring entrepreneurs and organizations while at the same time personally gaining crucial professional skills and experience in international business development. I am especially excited to visit India for the first time and learn about its heritage and culture from its citizens across different societal sectors and cities. If there is one thing I live for – it’s for adventures around the world! My passport is the evidence.

My goals for this summer are to secure InSight partnerships across NGOs, MFIs, private banks, and entrepreneurs, while building my voice in the field for the good use of technology and innovation.  Many times we, as technology consumers, get caught up on attaining the shiniest, latest gadgets and spend hundreds of dollars in this pursuit. But we rarely stop to think about leveraging the already existing tools and technology to those who have yet to learn about them living on an income of a dollar a day. I am passionate about providing simple, efficient, low cost tools that will close the digital divide across all economic levels.

From Corporate America to Silicon Beach Startup!  

Two weeks into my fellowship, I have already experienced some of the perks of working for a Silicon Beach real startup – a dynamic, creative and unstructured environment a block from the beach. Having lunch with a view of the ocean was not a bad way to kickoff my summer! It would be a disservice to over romanticize entrepreneurship. The InVenture staff is by far one of the hardest working teams I have worked with. This drive for efficiency is part of InVenture’s strength – creating as much impact as possible with limited resources. On my first day I learned about three different software applications for real time international team collaboration and project management. I knew I was in thick of the action when I jumped on the weekly, hands on teleconferences that bring the India, NYC, and LA staff together to discuss progress and tackle the next milestone.

I was a bit in awe on my first day at InVenture because I had finally made my way to working in a startup, in a shared workspace, where your drive is your only boss. Coming from the overly process-driven world of aerospace engineering, this change of pace, environment, and control felt empowering. As with any multi-national growing venture, some level of processes and best practices are needed in order to maximize resources. InVenture strikes a fine balance between both worlds. The fellowship has already exceeded my expectations! By my second weekend I was already discussing and sharing sales strategy with the team in India and LA and learning about the financial models of the product and overall firm. I ended my second week by attending a StartUp LA venture pitch competition and took notes about what to do and what not to do from other entrepreneurs competing for potential investment and mentors. Learning about the impact on employment and community that spirit tech driven startups are having in the state of California truly made me feel like a contributor to societal and economic progress of this beautiful city.  I can’t wait to take what I have experienced so far and apply it in Bangalore, India!

---

[1] http://inventurefund.tumblr.com/post/25019332574/interesting-announcement-made-the-u-s

[2] Goland, G., Schiff, R., & Stein. P. (October 2010). Two trillion and counting – Assessing the credit gap for micro, small, and medium-size enterprises in the developing world. McKinsey & IFC

National Parks, Non-Profits, and America’s Great Outdoors

Hi everyone, my name is Tim Letts, and this summer I’m interning as a consultant with the National Park Service’s Business Management Group.  The internship pairs MBA, public policy, and environmental science graduate students to tackle pressing issues for various parks throughout the United States.  Unlike the other teams in this year’s program, which are working directly for a Park Service unit, my team is working with a non-profit organization in Columbia, SC, in support of the administration’s America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.  Our client, The River Alliance, is dedicated to making the waterways around Columbia accessible for the benefit of the public and has already created 10 miles of “greenway,” a series of recreational paths and trails along the three rivers that run through Columbia.

The next phase of the project is the creation of an archaeological park connected to the greenway that explores the 12,000 years of human settlement on the site.  The mission of my consulting team is to develop organizational and operational models for the proposed park, along with revenue generating activities to keep the park financially sustainable.  So far we’ve gotten up to speed on the history of The River Alliance and the work that has been done thus far in regards to the proposed park, and  have begun researching the structure of similar parks (I read more about archaeology and Native American mounds before 10 AM than most people do all day!  Our project is sponsored by Congaree National Park, which displays a beautiful old-growth, flood plain forest, 45 minutes outside of Columbia.  The park provides us access to the organizational knowledge and expertise of the National Park Service, as well as great access to hiking and paddling along the Congaree River.  That’s all for now, more to follow, but here are a couple of pictures from the Three Rivers Greenway and Congaree National Park.

Defining Impact

For our first major post, we recorded, from our various locations throughout the globe, a few of our own perspectives on Social Impact.  Stay tuned for more posts over the next two months as we continue to refine our understanding of impact and give you some firsthand glimpses into the exciting and challenging work we are engaging in this summer (click on  ‘Meet the Fellows’ above for more info).

 

We hope you enjoy our thoughts and join us in the discussion on Social Impact!

–NYU Stern SIIF Fellows 2012

Welcome!

Welcome to the website for NYU Stern’s SIIF Fellows!  In this space, you can learn more about us, what we’re doing for the summer, and our varied perspectives on Social Impact.  We hope you enjoy and join us in the conversation!