Harbus

Issue date: 12/3/01 Section: Access Recruiting Guide

During my first year I got involved with the Volunteer Consulting Organization - something I highly recommend to anyone interested in nonprofit, consulting, or just a good team-based experience (shameless plug #1). The satisfaction I derived from that experience was different than in for-profit consulting. Nonprofits are almost always resource-constrained - therefore, the areas that they are working on are, by definition, critical.

Despite the red-hot job market (not), I decided to use the summer as an opportunity to try something different from the consulting that had been the mainstay of my professional career. I found a surprising quantity of nonprofit and social sector jobs in the job bank, ranging from consulting to the nonprofit community, to working for area nonprofits, to venture philanthropy. The concept of venture philanthropy intrigued me (okay, I admit it - I initially confused it for VC and got excited...). Venture philanthropy differs from traditional philanthropic giving in a few important ways - there is more of an emphasis on measurement of results, there is a longer-term commitment of support, and there is a deeper involvement in the operations of the nonprofit.

The other key ingredient was the HBS Nonprofit and Public Management Summer Fellowship Program. This outstanding program (shameless plug #2) supplemented my salary, allowing me to work in nonprofit without having to make an extra visit to the nice people at CitiAssist. The program has also provided a community of other people on campus who are interested in social enterprise.

I accepted a job with Common Good, a venture philanthropy fund run out of Waterville, ME. The focus of Common Good is on helping mission-based businesses become more financially self-sufficient through improving their business operations. My office was Portland, ME - a beautiful working New England city (shameless plug #3). The most difficult part of the summer was finding a place to live - there is not much in the way of short-term furnished housing in Portland.

I was assigned to work with two of Common Good's clients. I had a lot of discretion in creating the experience I wanted - there were plenty of high-impact issues to work on, leaving me to choose those that were the most personally interesting. My goals for the summer included working on marketing issues, and staying near Boston. Therefore, I worked with two of Common Good's partners in Portland, ME - The Stone Soup Café and East End Kids Katering. Stone Soup is a soup and sandwich café with the mission of providing homeless teens and adults with culinary arts job skills. East End Kids Katering has a commercial catering operation that supports a program to deliver delicious high-nutrition meals to schoolchildren around Portland.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools