Working Professional MBAs Aid Dallas Foundation in Providing Assistance to U.S. Soldiers

In addition to juggling jobs and classes, MBA students in Dallas and Houston decided to tackle the world of nonprofits through the summer ENHANCE program for working professionals.
 
Five students from the Texas MBA at Dallas/Fort Worth and Texas MBA at Houston programs worked with the Dallas Foundation to help distribute more than $1.6 million to nonprofit organizations. The Dallas Foundation is a publicly supported charitable foundation consisting of named funds, which support the arts, education, health and social services, primarily in the Dallas area. As part of a larger grant called the Texas Resources for Iraq-Afghanistan Deployment Fund (TRIAD), the organization will use the funds to meet the needs of military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.
 
“We really felt like we made a huge impact on the lives of people,” says team leader Ganesh Raghu, MBA ’08. “It was really satisfying for us as a team.”
 
As part of their ENHANCE project, the students were asked to pinpoint areas of greatest need for soldiers and veterans. Raghu says he and his teammates spent more than 200 hours analyzing survey results to uncover soldiers’ top needs. The team included Raghu, Ann Blevins, Jordan Scribner and Carrie Foster of the Dallas program and Cynthia Leong of the Houston program.
 
Once the analysis was complete, the team determined the grant would be best used by providing mental and physical health services to soldiers, veterans and their families. And when it was time for the fund distribution, the students saw their work pay off.
 
The Dallas Foundation allotted more than $500,000 to Mental Health America and the American Red Cross. As a result, about 700 veterans and family members will have access to free mental health care. Additional funding priorities were emergency assistance, family reintegration, job training and employment, and dependent youth services.
 
In addition to volunteering their time for a worthy cause, the students gained skills to add to their resumes.
 
“The full-time MBA students have summer internships to go after, but the working professionals can’t do the summer internship because we all have full-time jobs,” says Raghu. “So we all wanted to get the internship experience. That was the motivating factor.”
 
Raghu, who was an engineer before becoming a business development manager for Cisco Systems Inc., says he picked the nonprofit project because it offered him a new challenge. The other four team members had prior nonprofit experience, but Raghu did not. The Dallas Foundation project also gave those students who had already worked with nonprofits a new perspective on the industry.
 
“A nonprofit organization does not have to operate with a poverty mentality. So many organizations do, and, in my personal opinion, it’s to their detriment,” says Carrie Foster, MBA ’08. “If nonprofits would operate with a for-profit mentality but comply with the nonprofit regulations, many more of them would succeed and reach their objectives.”
 
Jordan Scribner, MBA ’08, said in his experience, working for nonprofits is more emotionally and spiritually rewarding.
 
“You often receive much greater appreciation from those you help for your hard work than you do at a corporate job (regardless of whether you go above and beyond at work),” Scribner says. “While goals and deadlines are harder to enforce in nonprofit organizations, the desire to meet them is greater.”
 
Barbara van Pelt, the Dallas Foundation’s consultant for the TRIAD fund, says she appreciated the students’ enthusiasm for the task.
 
“We believe their work has led to more focused grantmaking and will assist the Dallas Foundation in identifying those programs that meet the most pressing needs of those suffering hardship due to deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan,” says van Pelt. —Jennifer Lloyd