support that go beyond what a brainstorming can provide, but does not require a three-to-four month engagement.  In addition, volunteers may be less able to commit to a three-to-four month project during these fluid times.  Thus, we are offering this service alongside our traditional Deep Dive consulting projects.  We will be closely evaluating our pilot Sprint projects this fall to see if they could be useful as a new product line going into the future.

In addition, to build capacity by spreading the word among alumni on the benefits of volunteering through Community Partners, we launched our first ever Ambassador Program.  We have 14 alumni, mostly recent graduates, who are willing to share with their networks at their employers and graduating classes future project opportunities.  We hope this expanded marketing effort will yield more volunteers than ever before.

At the same time, we have a sub-committee exploring how we can best measure the longer-term impact of our consulting with nonprofits, and how to best share this with alumni.  While we routinely survey our nonprofits and alumni right after a consulting engagement, we do not routinely check-in one year later on the impact of the recommendations.  More details on the results of this team’s work will come by the end of the year.

The recent unveiling of the depth of racial injustice in our society, shockingly exacerbated by the pandemic, underscored the need for us to take action.  During the summer, we identified and reached out to local nonprofits addressing racial injustice to offer our pro bono consulting and brainstorming support.  We examined our own leadership, policies and processes to explore whether there is unconscious bias in our very infrastructure.  And we are committed to offering in our upcoming nonprofit board summit a dedicated panel on building diversity on boards.  There is still more work to do for sure.  We will be working side-by-side with nonprofits who are also looking to re-examine their diversity, equity and inclusion practices, and we hope to build real-time and then share out some new best practices in this space.