Harvard Business School Alums Provide Valuable Volunteer Consulting

By Gretchen Grant
Executive Vice President
The Harvard Business School Club of Greater New York, Inc.

The Harvard Business School Club of Greater New York is an alumni organization whose members, HBS alumni, generally live and work in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. As with other alumni associations, activities and programs cover many areas of interest to alumni, focusing largely on their professional interests.

In addition, this alumni organization has a history of creating, developing and managing organized programs for its members to provide free volunteer advice and assistance to nonprofits, schools and public sector agencies.

What Community Partners Is
Community Partners is the current iteration of the HBS alumni volunteer consulting programs that trace their history back over 35 years to Brooke Mahoney's pioneering work, which she later took outside and developed as the Volunteer Consulting Group's groundbreaking work with nonprofit boards.

The HBS alumni volunteer consulting practice went on to significant success on the West Coast under the name Community Partners. A few years ago, several HBS alumni who were active participants there moved to the New York area and brought with them the best practices of the West Coast operation.

How Your Organization Can Benefit
Community Partners engagements help client organizations create and develop strategies, plan significant changes, take advantage of major opportunities or deal with challenges. These may involve the organization's relationships with constituencies -- such as clients, communities, donors, funders or oversight authorities -- or internal matters such as growth, structure, reorganizations or mergers.

Clients in the New York area have recently included Big Apple Circus, The Discovery Museum, Jobs for Youth, Association to Benefit Children, The New York Public Library, American Lung Association, and Doctors Without Borders.

What Makes a Good Community Partners Engagement In the words of one recent Community Partners client, "If we'd have had [a leading consulting firm] do this, it would've cost six figures."

The process leading to a Community Partners engagement always includes a meeting with the top person in the prospective client organization -- board chair, president or executive director. If that person won't meet with us, there will be no engagement; if it's not important enough for him or her to be personally involved, how important can this be to the organization?

Technology as a Key Enabler
Community Partners' focus is on what its clients need, whatever areas of expertise may be required. Most nonprofits, schools and public sector agencies deal primarily with people and information, and seek to implement the best practices that information technology has to offer.

Many organizations want guidance about new information technologies. Everyone is inundated with information about these fast-moving technologies; many people use them, and want their organizations to deploy the best of them, in the best way.

Some Community Partners engagements focus on information technology, and many deal with technology as an important part of the strategies and actions for client organizations.

Contact Community Partners at The Harvard Business School Club of Greater New York, telephone (212) 947-5544, or e-mail feedback@hbscny.org. Ask for the Community Partners brochure.