Rajib Guha ’13
My Experience
The Blue Ridge Foundation is a social innovation incubator that invests in promising early stage nonprofits that seek to enhance economic and social mobility. As a Blue Ridge summer associate, I worked as a consultant to several of the foundation’s current grantees: Common Justice (a restorative justice program that seeks to break the cycle of violence in urban communities and provide a meaningful alternative to incarceration for offenders), Blue Engine (a national service model that places teaching assistants in New York City classrooms), and Green City Force (a workforce development program in the clean energy space).
My projects focused on growth strategy and performance management. For Common Justice, I prepared a literature review on capacity building and program replication, developed a tool (along with fellow Blue Ridge summer associate and SESF recipient Beth Mitchell) for potential new program sites to assess the viability of the Common Justice program model in their communities, assessed the organization’s readiness for growth, and formulated potential organizational growth models. For Blue Engine, I built a cloud-based database application to help school site managers track and evaluate their staff. For Green City Force, I conducted preliminary research on some potential expansion sites and devised screening criteria for future research.
My hope is that my work with each of these organizations will help them pursue their respective missions with greater clarity and new insights.
Given that my pre-MBA work experience was entirely in the nonprofit sector, I was initially uncertain which concrete skills from my first year in business school I would be able to apply to my role as a nonprofit consultant. However, I soon realized that in order to be effective in my internship, I would need to apply both the intuition I inherited from my previous work and the enhanced skills I developed at Columbia. My MBA core and flex-core courses in strategy, marketing, operations, and financial planning and analysis were useful in providing me with frameworks and concepts that I was able to apply in my evaluations of internal capacity and performance and my recommendations for improved operational effectiveness and strategies for growth. The electives I took in the Social Enterprise Program - education leadership, high performing nonprofits, and impact investing and social ventures – were also invaluable in providing a context for the landscape in which both Blue Ridge and the grantees operate and raising important questions about the use of metrics in the social sector. Finally, the consulting projects I undertook through the Small Business Consulting Program and the education leadership elective provided me with meaningful preparation in the art of working with clients and preparing client/user-friendly deliverables.
While the Blue Ridge Foundation is an exceptional place to work, a challenge inherent to the summer associate role is that it is largely self-directed. The foundation’s executive director (Matt Klein) did a great job in developing projects that met the interests and needs of the client organizations and the interns alike. Although he was a tremendously helpful resource whenever we needed support or guidance, we were largely left to ourselves to complete our projects. In other words, it was ultimately up to the summer associates to develop our own project work plans, refine project goals and deliverables with our clients, schedule meetings, provide interim updates, etc. Since I am used to working independently, this was never a major issue. However, whenever there was less of a sense of urgency or clarity around a particular project, I had to learn to be patient as I tried to get the information I needed to establish concrete objectives and commence the actual work. Balancing organizations’ occasionally competing needs was also an occasional challenge, but I found that honest and open communication with the clients mitigated most potential problems. In the end, the relatively unstructured nature of the internship proved beneficial as it gave me greater flexibility to adjust my projects as clients’ needs changed and helped me develop better time management and prioritization skills.
Working at the Blue Ridge Foundation was a fantastic experience which reinforced the reasons I was motivated to apply to Columbia after eight years of working in the nonprofit sector. In order to prepare for a post-MBA career in nonprofit consulting or social entrepreneurship, I sought a summer internship that would leverage both my pre-MBA background and the enhanced technical and “soft” skills I developed in my first year of business school. To that end, Blue Ridge was a great fit. It offered me a unique opportunity to work under a thoughtful and supportive executive director who is an established leader in the “hot” field of venture philanthropy and complete meaningful consulting engagements with a diverse portfolio of high-potential startup nonprofits. Moreover, I appreciated that there was such a great energy in the foundation’s space and that I was able to witness first-hand how my client organizations operate and engage deeply with their visionary leaders and talented staff. I left my internship at Blue Ridge inspired by the work of the organizations with which I worked, optimistic that I had added value to their efforts and motivated to continue contributing to the nonprofit sector in which there is so much potential for further social innovation and impact.
