My project was supporting the founders of the BCRE to pursue launching a startup company with the goal of using the startup as a vehicle to establish the first ever Bronx Community Foundation. The startup initiative, dubbed Citizen360, is to implement a technological system to provide services such as community intelligence and social benefits matching to help solve socioeconomic inequalities experienced in the Bronx. The mission of the BCRE is to support Bronx citizens in need of social support in the form of food insecurity, job/income insecurity, housing insecurity and many more socioeconomic needs. Citizen360 is a natural extension of the BCRE’s goals of supporting the Bronx — leveraging technology to implement community solutions to improve the quality of life in the nation’s poorest zip code. The work covered aspects of building a startup, including strategic market surveillance, product development, fundraising research, and other early startup tasks.

Without the education I gained from Columbia, I could not have begun supporting the BCRE in my internship capacity. The requirements of the role were to do strategic and competitive analyses to survey the landscape of social enterprise startup initiatives currently offering similar services. This required an understanding of the market, the needs of the target market, and the current landscape of enterprises servicing the market. Furthermore, the role required covering certain aspects of the product development lifecycle, including idea validation, stakeholder alignment, and developing the product roadmap. These skills were ones that I had generated through classes taken in the core and over the summer. I also leveraged my writing and presentation skills to develop written business plans, grant applications, and presentations that could be used to secure funding from various sources, and used my research skills to find funding opportunities through foundations, venture capital firms, and corporate grants that could be applied to for funding initial development efforts.

The most difficult obstacle to overcome were resources related. The BCRE was founded to assist the Bronx community with COVID-19 related issues, and therefore the concentration and effort dedicated to Citizen360 could only come from a select few. The BCRE ran programs related to food drives, small business consulting, and other efforts to assist different stakeholders in the Bronx during the pandemic crisis. Citizen360 is still in its exceedingly early days of development and implementation, where much of the work done is by trial and error. Furthermore, as more and more information about the strategic landscape, alternative fundraising resources, and additional partnerships came to light, there could be changes in the overall direction of the Citizen360 effort, as well as the allocation of time and resources to different aspects of the project.

My goals were to get experience in working with a scrappy organization with limited resources and an ambitious goal, find opportunities to use and apply the skills and knowledge I gained at Columbia towards a work product, and to give back to a community that was ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic in the city of New York, where I was born and raised. I feel that I was able to accomplish all of those goals while supporting a very noble and ambitious effort that will, once up and running, provide a great deal of benefit to the Bronx community and to hopefully other low-income communities around the United States as well. I plan to continue to support the Citizen360 effort however I can through the remainder of my time with Columbia Business School, and potentially post-graduation as well.