Business Schools Connect Students With Charities

Numerous business schools are connecting students with nonprofit boards in the hopes that young people will get interested in community service — and to provide benefits to local charities, reports The Wall Street Journal

Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago are among the institutions whose business schools undertake such efforts.

The benefits of these programs are twofold: Nonprofit-group board members can get much-needed help by assigning projects that capitalize on the students’ skills in finance, strategy, and marketing, while students learn that they need more than a passionate interest in a particular cause to join a nonprofit board.

“Research shows that a lot of business people are not very effective on nonprofit boards,” says Raymond Horton, director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School. “They often don’t know how far to push their business talents and end up trying to micromanage.”

Read The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s article on connections between business students and nonprofit groups.

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