Issue: Summer 2015 | Posted: June 8, 2015

1050 U.U. Drive

Germantown MBA students partner with nonprofit

A nonprofit organization in Memphis may be able to expand its work across the state thanks to the efforts of students in Union’s Master of Business Administration program at Germantown.

Arise2Read, an effort that started as a ministry of Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, sends volunteers into inner-city schools to tutor second graders in reading.

“We’re having tremendous success, and we’re really looking forward to being able to expand our influence and include more churches and schools until we reach every second grader so that they can reach their full potential,” said Donna Gaines, founder and president of the Arise2Read board.

Gaines is a Union alumna and wife of Bellevue pastor Steve Gaines.

A board member from Arise2Read contacted Kevin Westbrook, professor of marketing at Union University Germantown, about his MBA students working with the organization on a business plan. Over the past several years, Union MBA students in Germantown have helped several local nonprofits by doing similar work as class projects.

Westbrook said the projects are invaluable for the students, because they provide real-world experience instead of relying on simulations from textbooks. In his strategic marketing cohort, Westbrook divided the class into three competing teams to develop and present their proposals to Arise2Read.

“There’s kind of this competitive spirit, which is very analogous to what these students will see in the real business world when they’re out competing for sales proposals or consulting projects or internal projects within their organizations,” Westbrook said. “That kind of creates a competitive fervor within the class, which really stimulates learning.”

While Arise2Read tutors help children specifically with their reading, they also direct children to local after-school programs run by churches that partner with the organization. At those programs, volunteers minister to the children and share the gospel with them.

Westbrook said the students in the class worked on plans to help Arise2Read recruit more volunteers and to identify what a statewide model of the program would look like if it expanded to Nashville, Chattanooga or Knoxville.

“The students were challenged,” Westbrook said. “They indicated that they learned an enormous amount through the project.

“We’re very excited about the project because we’re actually able to help this organization reach kids that need to learn to read, but also because we created a plan for the organization to expand their evangelism into the local community and share Christ with an unsaved world.”

Gaines said the work of the Union students was exceptional.

“What we’re going to gain from them, we could have gotten from nowhere else,” she said.

Alicia Dobrzeniecki, one of the students in the class who works as consumer experience consultant at Humana, said the project was a rewarding experience.

“It’s also been a learning experience as well,” Dobrzeniecki said. “I think that the commitment to provide them with valuable information has really helped with the learning process, because it pushes you to give back to the community and to those nonprofit agencies.”