Students with Miss Vera, a social entrepreneur in The Idea Village network, to whom they provided business consulting and a business plan.
Service Learning Trips
- After Katrina, a Lesson in Business, Hope LA Times article March 29, 2007 [
15.7MB] - Merchants Get Top Academic Advice Times Picayune New Orleans Edition article March 2007 [ 176 KB]
- Reporter article by students on New Orleans Service Learning Trip [ 1.9 MB]
- Video of pre-trip speaker Stuart David Smolkin, senior executive at Intralox LLC [
1hr. 21 minutes]
- Thailand "Barefoot MBA" an intriguing account of two students' work to create a basic business curriculum for aspiring entrepreneurs in rural Thailand as part of the Service Learning Summer Program
- Spring
2006 Service Learning Trips [
PPT 14.8MB]
New Orleans Service Learning Trip, Spring 2007
Following on the success of the 2006 Service Learning Trip, GSB students felt the desire to return to New Orleans. In 2007 the focus of the trip was no longer on gutting houses to address the physical destruction of Hurricane Katrina, but on redevelopment efforts with specific interest in supporting small business corridors in New Orleans.
Hope in Rebuilding Small Business
Students walked away with complex questions about the long-term viability of a city still strapped for resources—both in the form of human and financial capital, about the tensions running both within and beyond the context of redevelopment, and about a once-thriving city’s hard work to get back on its feet. Yet amidst the concerns, is an underpinning of hope that this gem of the United States will someday be more vibrant than ever.
According to one participant, “Service Learning Trips should be an integral part of the MBA program. They allow you to use your business skills, comprehend how you can impact lives, and, most of all, create an impact. This trip was a life-changing event for me. It will be a milestone in my life that I shall cherish forever!”
Partnering with The Idea Village
The unique form of engagement achieved during the New Orleans Service Learning trip would not have been possible without the support of our nonprofit partner The Idea Village, which was founded in 2000 upon the belief that entrepreneurship can provide a catalyst to ignite social and economic change.
The Stanford GSB partnered with Idea Village through their IDEAcorps Program. Through this program, university students engage with small business members by using their knowledge and skills—in this case, business skills—to provide an immediate and positive impact to business corridors. During this trip, students conducted focused strategy sessions with local entrepreneurial clusters to help prioritize their most pressing business needs and assisted in the development of strategies to address them. The achieved goal was to create a customized plan to grow 25 small businesses through strategic guidance and targeted grants.
