Board Fellows recently received a $1,000 grant from the SA’s newly founded Community Impact Fund. The grant is to be spent on additional non-profit sector training for both current board fellows and the broader HBS community.
Participants in the board fellows program join the boards of non-profit organizations as non-voting members, where they participate in a year-long leadership engagement. Ozge Bulat, VP Fundraising of the HBS Social Enterprise Club, which is behind Board Fellows, described the purpose of the program as “to develop a connection between HBS and the non-profit world in Boston”. She described the benefits of the program as being twofold: “Students who become Board Fellows are exposed to the world of non-profit organizations, and also learn how boards function in the broader sense. The non-profits also benefit from the different experience, perspective and approach that the HBS students are able to provide, as they help tackle some of the most difficult questions facing the non-profit sector.” Board Fellows works with 22 organizations representing the full spectrum of Boston’s non-profit sector, such as Affordable Housing Institute Inc, Youth Entrepreneurs Alliance, and the Civic Symphony Orchestra.
The plans for spending the grant from the Community Impact Fund are equally twofold. The grant will enable the Social Enterprise Club to purchase non-profit management cases from HBS Publishing, so that participants in the Board Fellows program will be able to sharpen their non-profit skills through a dedicated case-based session led by an HBS faculty member. However, the Community Impact fund grant will also allow the program to reach into the broader HBS community, by opening up the training session beyond existing Board Fellows participants. As a result, a considerable number of HBS students will have access to the case materials and to the experiences the Board Fellows participants have gained, and the program will begin to reach beyond its participants into the wider student body. This is consistent with the Community Impact Fund’s goal of increasing the positive impact of HBS students in the community.
Board Fellows is led by co-presidents Kimberley Hyde, Jake Broder-Fingert and John McCarthy, and is one of two HBS Social Enterprise Club initiatives funded in the first round of SA Community Impact Fund allocations.