MBAs Lend Their Skills to Nonprofit Boards
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...
