HSIF: Entrepreneurs Changing Communities – Dulce Kadise

This is the fourth post in our Haas Social Impact Fund (HSIF) series.

Dulce Kadise and her team with Michael Baker, co-founder of MBAs Across America, in New Orleans, LA.

Traveling from New Orleans to Alabama to Little Rock to Nashville, Dulce Kadise (MBA16) worked to understand and assist four entrepreneurs’ varying needs and goals through MBAs Across America. A popular organization with Haas MBAs, Dulce and classmate Dan Fishman (MBA16) were teamed with a Harvard MBA and a Stanford MBA to, as Dulce described, “embark on a 5-week journey across the country working with four entrepreneurs who are changing their communities.”

In New Orleans, the team worked with Your Nutrition Delivered, a business focused on food as medicine, delivering meals tailored customers with certain diseases or conditions, brainstorming expansion strategy, including geographies, channels, and products.

Cash, Training, Coaching for Social Entrepreneurs in GSVC

Image from Drinkwell: 2015 GSVC Winner

Social entrepreneurs from around the world will compete in the 2016 Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC). Applications are due by Friday, December 4.

Apply Today

Offering $50,000 in prizes, the GSVC aims to identify the most innovative and promising social enterprise startups from around the world. Three rounds of judging determine the winner based on these criteria:

• business potential (33%),
• social or environmental impact (33%),
• likelihood of success (33%)

Last year’s competition attracted more than 500 entries from 40 nations. The first-place winner, Drinkwell, developed a technology and a business model for water filtration systems that protect people from arsenic in groundwater.

HSIF: Creating Sustainable Accounting Standards – Sonya Hetrick

This is the third post in our Haas Social Impact Fund (HSIF) series.

“We all know that internships are incredibly important in helping us decide the types of organizations we want to work for beyond our time here at Haas,” says Berkeley-Haas MBAA VP of Community and leader of the Haas Social Impact Fund (HSIF) fundraising and award process, Robbie Heath. “Having some extra money to cover expenses during the summer can help our classmates focus more on preparing for that future.” Through the HSIF, select students interested in social sector internships are awarded fellowships granting financial assistance, mostly funded by current Haas MBA students who divert a small part of their summer salaries to support their classmates. This past summer, Sonya Hetrick (MBA16) was an HSIF Fellow working at the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).

Sonya Hetrick and her fellow SASBees with the SASB gong, which is rung to celebrate accomplishments.

SASB is a non-profit organization developing industry-specific sustainability standards for publicly traded companies to use in their SEC filings. Sonya saw that their culture aligns well with all four of Haas’s guiding principles, particularly that they are an organization that has Confidence without Attitude—confident in their research and in the organization’s mission, yet open to input from a wide variety of stakeholders in order to develop the best possible standards.

Students Helping Students Helping the Community

Every year, the Haas Social Impact Fund (HSIF) awards fellowships to first year full-time Haas MBA students taking summer internships at organizations in the non-profit or social sectors as well as for-profit social enterprises that have specific social impact goals. “The HSIF allows students to put their MBA skills toward great organizations and great causes without internship salary factoring as much into their decision,” said Robbie Heath (MBA16). Robbie is the MBA Association (MBAA) VP of Community, a position that traditionally leads the fundraising and award process. He got involved due to a desire to contribute: “I believe that a focus on social impact is something quite unique to the Haas culture. It is reflected in how we carry ourselves in our classes, conversations, clubs, events, etc., and the HSIF is just one way of ensuring that tradition of social focus continues.”

When students contribute to the HSIF, they are not directing their donation to specific organizations or causes. Rather, they are supporting classmates whose internships in the social sector offer a salary that is below average for MBA students. As Robbie explained, “Contributing to the HSIF is completely voluntary and allows classmates to support an entire portfolio of great candidates and projects that will really make a difference to these organizations and to the world.” Last year, there were 12 HSIF Fellows. Read about some of their experiences on the CSSL blog.