Whew, I know I’m a few days late on this entry, but I’ve been having some major computer issues in the past few days. My adware scanning software froze up on me and had my computer all kinds of screwed up for a day or so. Then, when I fixed that, the computer started running at a snail’s pace, so I just went ahead and reformatted the hard drive…whew, that was a lot of work. I still don’t know if I’ve got all the stuff I used to have on here reloaded. At least, this joint is running faster now, so I can’t complain too much.
On Sunday afternoon, the C4C Weekend ended and the entire event went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to participate in any of the sporting events, but I had a ball meeting kids from the other schools. There were cool cats from all of the schools, but the folks from the University of Washington were especially cool and willing to throw as many volunteers in as I needed to for shifts throughout the weekend. The final prize for C4C Weekend is “The Golden Briefcase” and the winner is determined by a combination of sports prowess during the weekend event (20% of the score) and money raised and local volunteer hours prior to the weekend (both are combined to account for 80% of the score). This year, the GSB won the sports competition but we lost out on the big prize to the University of Washington, who raised a ridiculous amount of money and had a high average number of local volunteer hours before the weekend. Overall, the MBA Challenge for Charity organization (across all 8 of the schools) raised over $400,000 and served over 11,000 volunteer hours for the Special Olympics and other charities (I hope some of the people who regular call MBA’s selfish are paying attention to that one). A huge shout out goes to the other seven C4C schools, the Stanford GSB participants, and especially rest of the Planning Committee for making C4C Weekend a great success and one of the best weekends of the school year.
One of the big things on my mind right now is my final project for my Strategic Philanthropy class, which is taught by Laura Arrillaga, the head of the Arrillaga Family Foundation. For this project, I’m working with a group of 6 to put together a grant proposal for a local non-profit that will be evaluated by Prof. Arrillaga and a panel of philanthropists. At the end of our project presentations, the panel of experts will judge our grant proposals and pick two non-profits out of the 10-11 presented to award a $5000 infrastructure building grant. My group will be working with Eastside College Preperatory School, which is a school in East Palo Alto that is committed to opening doors for historically underrepresented students, many of which will be the first in their families to go to college, in higher education. We have an 8am meeting with the folks over at Eastside tomorrow and, while it’ll be ridiculously hard to get up that early, I’m looking forward to the trip. My 5th grade IHAD mentee just got accepted at Eastside and he’s ecstatic, so I want to see what he’s so excited about. I hope we can win this scholarship for the school because I’m a huge fan of their mission to help guide kids from underrepresented backgrounds toward college. You know, if you’d asked me whether I thought I’d be working toward such a good cause in my B-school classes back in Sept 2004, I would have said “Heck no!”…man, the GSB is amazing.
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