Alumni Consulting Team (ACT)

Jon Richards, MBA '67

Through ACT I have worked on projects that had major strategic impacts on environmental organizations and performing arts groups. Since I am personally passionate about both, I've had a great sense of satisfaction from helping those organizations in meaningful ways. But why is ACT especially satisfying? The answer is the people.

At the GSB, I remember how much fun I had and how much I learned working with classmates on team projects. ACT teams are like that, with the added benefit of working with alumni from many class years and with current MBA students. ACT clients are people who are highly motivated by the missions of their organization and are extraordinarily cooperative and are grateful for our efforts.

Giving back to the community while working with fun, smart, motivated teammates for clients highly committed to missions of social contribution - that, for me, is all I could ask for.

Bryna Chang, MBA '03

I have always been interested in environmental conservation, yet my personal involvement had been limited to donating money, signing petitions, or shooting a letter off to my legislator. So I leaped at the opportunity to deepen my involvement through an ACT project with Sustainable Conservation, a San Francisco-based organization that finds ways the private sector can protect healthy ecosystems.

SusCon, as it is affectionately called, wanted to find ways to generate more earned income.My subteam explored the  viability of "fee-forservice" activities—could SusCon charge for some of the services it already provided?

In benchmarking and interviewing other organizations along the way, I had the opportunity for a behind-the-scenes examination of some of the other nonprofits I'd long admired, such as The Nature Conservancy, Peninsula Open Space Trust, and Marin Agricultural Land Trust. Understanding the operational context of these nonprofits lends greater meaning to my simpler, day-to-day acts of environmental participation.