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Ryan Bell first became passionate about helping young children while serving as a major in the army in Iraq, helping local Iraqis rebuild bombed-out schools, obtain textbooks, and get windows and electricity for their new buildings. When he arrived at Columbia Business School in the fall of 2010 for orientation, he wanted to continue his work with youth, a goal made attainable when he was accepted to Columbia’s Nonprofit Board Leadership Program, which pairs 30 MBA students each year with a local nonprofit board in the New York area.
Bell was assigned to serve on the board of Friends of the Children New York, an early intervention program in West Harlem that pairs at-risk children with mentors. In addition to attending board meetings, he assisted the board’s fundraising committee and quickly set about analyzing the nonprofit’s five-year strategic plan. By the end of his one-year term, he’d come up with a new evaluation system that helped the board use better metrics and comparative data for analyzing students’ progress, a change that ultimately resulted in the nonprofit getting $275,000 in additional funding, he says. For Bell, the experience has been a game changer, one that has cemented his desire to work with nonprofit boards in the future, he says.
“It was awesome, because I got inside access to how the organization works and was able to sit down with the decision makers and provide input,” says Bell, who is continuing his work with the organization as a member of Friends of the Children’s new junior board, which he co-founded with a Columbia alum. “I wasn’t an outsider, but I felt like a member of the team.”
Programs like the one Bell participated in, known as Board Fellows, are becoming increasingly common on business school campuses throughout the country. The initiatives are a way to get young people—a demographic that most nonprofit boards have trouble connecting with—involved with boards at an early stage in their careers. On average, only six percent of nonprofit boards have members under the age of 35, according to a 2008 Urban Institute study of nonprofits with annual expenses between $500,000 and $5 million.
That could change as more MBA students, whose average age hovers around 27 or 28, embrace the idea of working with a board while in school, says Liz Maw, executive director of Net Impact, a nonprofit for sustainability-minded student leaders and professionals. Net Impact launched a Board Fellows Initiative in 2007 to encourage more of its chapters to introduce programs that partner students with local nonprofits, and so far, MBA students seem to be up for the challenge, Maw says. In 2009, 30 MBA Net Impact chapters introduced Board Fellows programs, and in 2010, that number crept up to 49.
The increase comes as a growing number of MBA programs are placing an increased emphasis on corporate social responsibility in the curriculum. In 2011, for example, 79 percent of schools required students to take a course dedicated to business and society issues, according to the Aspen Institute’s most recent Beyond Grey Pinstripes Survey, a biennial ranking of business schools. At the same time, students are looking to get more hands-on experience that allows them to work with organizations that advance social causes, Maw says. Board Fellows programs provide just that; almost all require students to do a project that utilizes their business skills and helps the board operate more effectively. For instance, fellows perform board effectiveness audits, examine the organization’s donor base and fund-raising efforts, and help them come up with marketing and social media plans.
“MBA programs have really been stepping up two different areas during the last two years, social impact course work and experiential projects,” Maw says. “If you put those two together, the board fellows program is a perfect match.”
