HBS Community Partners "Making a Difference"

HBSAO Community Partners is pleased to provide alumni the opportunity to apply their business and management skills as volunteer consultants working on challenging and worthwhile projects in the nonprofit sector by offering two exciting new projects:

• Mercy Corps Northwest (MCNW): MICROLENDING for low income entrepreneurs.  MCNW's mission is to promote economic self-sufficiency through microenterprise development and self-employment.  This provides a domestic context to the parallel mission of its parent organization, Mercy Corps, whose mission is to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression by empowering people to build secure, productive and just communities.  After serving the six counties of the Portland, OR - Vancouver, WA metroplex, MCNW has extended its services to all of Oregon and Washington.  MCNW serves all low-income populations, including minorities, women, refugees and immigrants, prisoners and the previously incarcerated, and persons living with disabilities.

MCNW is seeking the assistance of HBSAO Community Partners to further refine strategies to engage peer partners and, through that success, solidify expansion to all of Oregon and Washington.  This should serve as a model for replication nationally.  The first component involves an analysis of microlenders regionally to determine the scope and success of lending activities.  The second component is to solidify partnerships with four organizations in each state and deliver a series of trainings for them.  From those relationships, MCNW plans to co-lend with these partners.

• Friends of the Children (FOTC): COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS and Community ROI of long-term commitment.  The mission of FOTC is to provide a nurturing and sustained long-term relationship (12 years) to Portland's most vulnerable children - children who lack a family structure, are not connected to school in any meaningful way, and are being exposed to drug use, domestic violence, and gang activities in their families and neighborhoods.  FOTC provides an adult mentor, a role-model eho teaches positive values and has attainable expectations for each child in order that they become healthy, productive members of the community.  Research shows that, for youth at highest risk, short-term mentoring relationships do not result in significant positive impact and can cause harm.  MCNW is committed to providing children with a Friend from kindergarten through high school.

The goal of a partnership between FOTC and HBSAO Community Partners would be to complete a cost-benefit analysis based on FOTC's long-term goals.  FOTC believes an upstream investment in intensive, relationship-based services for youth experiencing multiple risk factors is a good economic choice.  However, FOTC is often compared with other programs in the community based on annual cost-per-child alone, rather than within the local context of the ROI in changing the trajectory of youth and breaking the cycle of generational family histories of educational failure, teen parenting, unemployment, violence, and incarceration.  HBS CP consultants' analysis will include the positive contributions that occur when a young person completes varying levels of education/training and becomes regularly employed over the cours of adulthood.

 For more information about either of these projects or the HBSAO Community Partners program, contact Rob Gardier, rgardier@mba1984.hbs.edu .