Harbus

Issue date: 1/26/09 Section: Features

Nearly fifty HBS students spent ten days in New Orleans. They completed service projects for 9 different organizations while down there, doing everything from writing business plans to building houses to assessing the mortgage market.

For those of you who don't know what a King Cake is, picture a cinnamon bun. Only way bigger. And covered in green, purple and gold sprinkles, with about twice as much sugar and icing as you can possibly conceive of eating. That's a King Cake. And inside every King Cake is a one-inch tall plastic baby, naked as the day it was born. According to tradition, if you bite into your piece of cake and find the baby, you get to buy the next King Cake.

The point of this tradition is not to stick someone with the bill. New Orleanians are hardly the sort to squabble over such matters. The purpose is to make sure that the party never stops.

In its fourth year, the New Orleans Service Immersion shows no sign of slowing down. Nearly 50 HBS students spent ten days in New Orleans this January, using their classroom experience to do some good in the real world. Working with 9 different organizations, teams of HBSers wrote business plans, assessed the impact of trends in the mortgage market on affordable housing, and refined marketing strategies. They also built houses, helped orchestrate a business plan competition, and worked to focus the program offering of a large multi-service nonprofit organization.

From its beginnings as a student-led response to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, the NOLA Immersion has developed into a defining academic experience at HBS that gives participants exposure to essential strategic questions faced by all organizations. Where the first two years of the Immersion were more about immediate relief services - debris removal and reconstruction of basic civic institutions - the most recent two years have been about starting to address longer term challenges faced by the city. Rather than thinking about how to launch new schools, for example, this year's participants were helping to address truly fundamental questions about how to compensate and incentivize the teachers in them - questions that school systems in cities across the country are asking.

Even with this change in the nature of much of the work HBS students are doing in New Orleans, basic recovery efforts are still needed. While macro-level statistics on the city show that 87% of the pre-Katrina population has returned to the area, along with 86% of jobs and 90% of sales tax revenue, the pace of recovery has flattened and parts of the city remain decimated. In the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood that once was home to more than 18,000 people, fewer than 11% have returned. Parts of the Lower Ninth Ward where hundreds of houses once stood remain nothing more than open fields. Federal, state and local government plans for rebuilding these areas have failed to become reality, and residents are without basic public and commercial infrastructure. A city that was once 70% African American is now less than 50% African American. Such devastation leaves difficult questions about whom the recovery is reaching and what resources were directed toward these neighborhoods even before they were destroyed by the flood.

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