As future business leaders, it’s important for Ivey students to support their surrounding communities and make a positive change – make an impact.
Ivey MBA students recently participated in the annual Ivey Impact Day. This student-run event offers students a variety of opportunities to explore and identify different ways to increase their impact on communities.
In addition to getting out into the community, this year, the Ivey Impact team introduced a new twist: they brought in local companies and asked students to solve a business challenge faced by that organization.
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The executive team from Ivey Social Impact Organization, who were responsible for organizing Ivey Impact Day, saw an opportunity to enhance the way in which the MBA students engage with the social sector by using not only their hands, but their heads as well.
Executive team member Owen Chung stressed the success of the inaugural social business design challenge at Ivey Impact Day.
“Students found this engagement with a social organization very relevant to the development they wanted to get out of their MBA,” said Chung. “And they appreciated the ability to spend a day giving back to the community.”
With the social business design challenge, students formed small teams and applied their knowledge and experience to provide recommendations on improvement opportunities. Organizations involved in the challenge included SoJo, VERGE Capital, and Klink Coffee.
With hands-on volunteering, students immersed themselves in the community and spent the day either at Reforest London helping to plant and care for trees, or throughout London with beadonor.ca encouraging organ donor signup. Students undoubtedly made an impact for beadonor.ca, getting 143 Londoners to take the time to sign up, which represents the chance to save 1,144 lives.
Being forced to step out of his comfort zone, Omar Khan participated in VERGE Capital’s challenge to try and determine the Social Return on Investment (SROI) for a grocery farm in the Old East Village of London that would enable people with disabilities to enter the work force by developing transferable skills.
Coming from a finance background, Khan came into the challenge a bit concerned about how his skill set would come into play with the social aspect of investment.
“My idea of viewing investments as anything other than profitable was flipped on its head,” admitted Khan. “I genuinely had a changing experience in seeing how social returns were measurable and in fact not a mutually-exclusive concept from investment returns. It was a great experience that allowed me to see how I can give back to the community utilizing my skills even from a finance side of things.”
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