By Kelsie O’Flanagan and Jenny Chan, Fall 2017 Street Team
Happy December everyone! Our names are Kelsie O’Flanagan and Jenny Chan and we are both Service-Learning Street Team Members for this fall semester. We have both been S-LTA’s in former semesters and also happen to both be business majors here at Northeastern. We are following up on Bree’s wonderful blog post to showcase some of the business classes here on campus that are part of the S-L program. Service-Learning is an integral part in Northeastern’s approach to experiential learning and plays a meaningful role in students lives.
The three Fall 2017 business classes that incorporated service-learning are: Marketing Research, Marketing and Society and Skills for Managerial Success (a capstone course). All of these classes are project-based, as most business courses revolve around a large, semester-long group project that allows students to use what they’ve learned in the course and apply it to a real life situation; in this case, students completed projects for service-learning’s community partner organizations around Boston.
The students in this Fall’s Marketing Research course worked with St. Marks Community Education Program on a research project that helped them come up with a marketing plan that they can use now and can continue to build on, in the future.
In Marketing and Society, students worked on marketing proposals with the following organizations: You’re With Us!, Literacy Volunteers of Massachusetts, Boston Public Health Commission and St. Mark’s Community Education Program. These students learned about the nonprofits they are working with to create a proposal on a marketing strategy, very similar to the Marketing Research course, while focusing on how this nonprofit and its marketing plays a role in the society around them.
Geralyn Klein, Rebecca Kling, Laura Jones and Ayorinde Ifatunji present their marketing strategy for the Peer Leadership Institute at the Boston Public Health Commission in Marketing and Society.
The capstone course, Skills for Managerial Success worked with Service-Learning for the first time on a project where students consulted for nonprofits based on their co-op and educational experiences. Teams added to social media strategies and helped with volunteer outreach and fundraising. The teams are created plans for the following S-L partners: Everyday Boston, You’re With Us!, 826 Boston, Mission Hill Health Movement, Raising a Reader MA and Mujeres Unidas Avanzado.
We believe that it’s important for students across all majors to interact with the community and work to support organizations around Boston. Often, as students, we can be stuck in our college’s bubble. Through service-learning, students can get to know their community as well as the residents, nonprofits and local businesses around them. Business students have helped bring a unique perspective to S-L partners and have helped them to create plans to better serve the community in the future. We look forward to seeing these business courses continue in the Spring and expand their amazing work within the community.
We’d like to thank Shelbe, Laura Martz, Mike and Amanda for their contributions to this article post. **
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