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Alumni

The Funding Crisis Facing Nonprofits‌

We talked to Andrea Levere ’83 and Alexandra Sing ’20, CEO and COO of Capitalize Good, about the state of the social sector and the increased urgency of their work working with funders and nonprofits to move toward a model of stable, long-term capital.‌

A protester holding a sign reading "unfreeze the federal funds now."
  • How do markets work in your industry?

  • Can markets help the poor?

    A loan might allow you to buy a bike to commute to a new job or to nurse your business through an unexpected setback. But billions of people around the world have little or no access to financial markets. Microfinance is one potential solution to this dilemma.

  • What is trust worth?

    Steve LaVoie founded Arrowstream to improve supply-chain management in the restaurant business. He discovered that the benefits of trust in markets have been overlooked, in part because of an overemphasis on individual actors as opposed to relationships. He also learned that building and maintaining trust is hard work.

  • How can directors become truly independent?

    Joseph S. Fichera proposes an innovative way to make corporate directors more independent and effective by providing them with better information.

  • Would a management profession be more diverse?

    According to John Rice and Fred Smagorinsky '87, management is competing with traditional professions like law and medicine for talented minority students—and losing. Rice and Smagorinsky are trying to change that.

  • What does it mean to be a manager today?

    Ideas become actions when they're pressed into service in a particular context. So are ideals tempered by real experience. We wondered how the idea of management as a profession (and the ideal of management as a profession) would play out at the level of daily life.

    So, we sought out a group of graduates of the school. They've all gone to a management school and are managers by that definition at least, but they practice their craft (or profession) in different industries, locales, and roles. Each provides one view on the many-faceted world of management.

    First we asked the participants to chronicle a day out of their work lives, breaking the overarching issue of what constitutes management down to a manageable but still rich unit of analysis. Then we set them loose to discuss the notion of management as a profession.

  • Should business be personal?

    How can managers integrate their values into business decisions? Trish Karter '82 talks about the decision to keep her company's headquarters in inner-city Boston, and how it grew from her sense of self.

  • What can a professional association accomplish?

    Venture capitalists seed companies that are not yet a gleam in the public market's eye. Their investments can sprout and transform industries. Anne Glover '78, a past chairman of the British Venture Capital Association, says a professional association helps the industry self-police.

  • The chief professional?

    With their power, their prominence, and their pay packages, CEOs are cynosures in the business universe. Could the structures of a management profession take in these corporate chiefs? Or should CEOs of publicly traded companies be treated as members of a separate profession, with its own rules and responsibilities?