By Nitya Ramaswami (’18) and Taylor Cramm (’18)
In mid-November, UCLA Anderson hosted the 13th annual Net Impact Consulting Challenge (NICC), in partnership with Impact@Anderson and the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. This competition unites MBA students and the academic community with nonprofit organizations and for-profit social ventures to help achieve greater social impact in our community.
NICC is a hallmark event for UCLA Anderson’s Net Impact chapter, the 2017 Net Impact Graduate Chapter of the Year. UCLA Anderson aims to deepen its ties with the L.A. community through interactions with local nonprofit and socially driven organizations. A significant aspect of this outreach comes through consulting initiatives like NICC and Social Impact Fellows, where students have the opportunity to benefit mission-driven organizations while strengthening their business skill set.
Over the course of a two-week consulting engagement, MBA students provide strategic and operational guidance to local organizations to overcome challenges in a variety of functional areas such as fiscal management, operations, marketing and leadership transition.
Some of the client problems that students tackled included: developing a clinic’s growth strategy to reach new local communities in need of health services; mapping a plan to improve operational efficiency around relief efforts in areas affected by recent natural disasters; and proposing a financial plan that would help an organization benefiting children better manage existing funding and search for future opportunities.
Participating organizations represented a variety of programmatic causes, such as education, social justice, health care, youth/families and public service. NICC client organizations for 2017 included UCLA Mobile Eye Clinic, Daily Karma, Arodhum International, Pure Game, Team Rubicon, First Place for Youth, America SCORES LA, Intercare Therapy, Arts Bridging the Gap, Los Angeles County, New Star Family Justice Center and Engineer Factory.
This year, the team serving client UCLA Mobile Eye Clinic took first place, presenting recommendations that added value to the organization in large part because they were implementable — a key component of competition criteria.
UCLA Anderson has shown continued growth toward becoming an impact-focused MBA program, especially through the development of Impact@Anderson. This momentum has allowed us to capture significant amount of student interest through NICC. In 2017, the selection of 12 teams was highly competitive, with students across both our Fully Employed MBA and full-time MBA programs.
Following the two-week working period, students presented their strategic recommendations to judges sourced from a variety of industries, including nonprofit and consulting, in a case competition format. Judges then selected three teams to participate in the final rounds.
The primary goal of this event is to generate implementable and impactful solutions for each client, and our participating organizations continue to find value in involvement with UCLA Anderson students.
“I was amazed at how much the students learned about our agency in the two weeks they were given for the project,” said Elena Meloni, executive director of New Star Family Center. Tony Everett, founder of Pure Game, added, “It was an awesome experience, and we took away a great deal of information. We also may have found an additional board member from the event.”
As we wrap up NICC, the Social Impact Consulting group is looking to launch the Social Impact Fellows program in which students will have three months to perform analysis for various nonprofit and socially driven organizations.
The Price Center generously sponsored gifts and prize money amounting to $10,000, split among our top three teams. We relay our gratitude and appreciation to the Price Center for their long-standing partnership with this program.
We also thank all of our participants and look forward to strengthening our impact in the L.A. community!
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