Joellen Perry ’11Journal #1
After just a few weeks here at The Professional Program for Public Leadership (PPPL), I’m already enjoying putting many of my first-year MBA skills to work. First, a bit about the organization: PPPL aims to train leaders to work in reforming public-sector institutions. Eventually, the program could operate across the entire university and the entire public sectors, but, we aspire to start with a few professional schools here at Columbia, and to focus on K-12 education, largely because that’s the founder’s area of expertise. As the summer project manager (and second employee), I’m managing the program’s start-up phase; which means I’m getting a chance to develop a whole gamut of skill sets, from finance and marketing, to policy and strategic planning.
I spent much of the first couple of weeks familiarizing myself with some of the major issues in education reform — particularly the trend toward accountability, the institutional overhaul taking place in big K-12 education bureaucracies nationwide, and the influx of federal and philanthropic funding that’s funding much of the changes. It’s an exciting time to be in this field, both because there’s so much focus from all sectors — public, private, and non-profit — on the need for reform, and because the scope of the changes underway is so vast. PPPL also deals with fundamental questions of management and leadership, so it’s fun to contemplate management questions from an education-reform perspective.
After I’d taken some time to settle into the issues, we spent much of the month gearing up to present the program to potential partners and work on a major start-up grant application. I’ve drafted our proposal, including a detailed and hefty budget that gets the program to self-sustainability by year three, and prepared a number of funding prospects and marketing documents. It’s been fun to meld my year-one MBA skills with the skills I learned in my many years as a journalist, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the summer.
Journal #2
The more I learn about the field of education reform, the more I realize how little I know. It’s almost disheartening, but I suppose it’s true in every field, and, in any case, I’m excited by the prospect of learning more. Our work to get PPPL off the ground continues, and I’m still invigorated by the challenges of navigating this complex space and of putting both my MBA and journalism skills to work. I’m truly grateful to the Social Enterprise Summer Fellowship for giving me the chance to see how I might be able to make a difference here.
This month, after submitting a major grant proposal, we’ve continued refining the program’s scope and design, and planning in detail how to put ideas into action. Since I’ve spent the bulk of my career in the for-profit sector, it’s a new experience for me to see the impact of continually changing funding possibilities on our strategic planning. I imagine that’s an issue with which many non-profits wrestle, particularly in the start-up phase. It calls for real flexibility in both budgeting and vision, and it’s great to be able to put those corporate finance projection and modeling skills to work in the real world.
Journal #3
It’s hard to believe my time here is almost at an end. It’s been a great ride. I’ve had a fantastic, hands-on introduction to the issues and challenges of education reform, and I am thrilled to have had the chance to put my first-year MBA skills to use for such a worthwhile cause.
We’ve accomplished a number of milestones this month. Most importantly, we secured funding for next year, so the program — now called the Center for Public Research and Leadership — is set to debut in the spring of 2011. After we received our initial grant and published an opeEd on accountability and testing, I turned the bulk of my attention to CPRL’s next financial phase, and began developing a fundraising strategy to get us from a pilot program to a self-sustaining center in just a few years. As I leave, I’m once again grateful to the Social Enterprise Program for giving me the chance to immerse myself in an entirely new field for the summer and to see how I might put the skills I’m learning at Columbia Business School to use in the future.
