Business as a Force for Good: A Student Leadership Incubator

Business as a Force for Good (B4Good) gives students the opportunity to enhance their business and leadership skills by giving back to the greater community. Students from the Haskayne community at large as well as the Haskayne Consulting Club in particular were central to the project’s success.

Last spring, a dynamic group of Haskayne students gathered and had one simple goal: give back to the community in a meaningful way. As a result of these efforts, the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business (CCAL) developed a pilot called Business as a Force for Good.

The project began with small steps and a broad vision. Through Patricia Bailey, Director of Development for CUPS, a partnership with the Calgary Urban Project Society (CUPS) was developed to allow students to volunteer and organize a food-drive and fundraising campaign during the 2018 winter semester. Since 1989, CUPS has helped Calgarians overcome adversity and build resilience through health care, housing and education services.  

Haskayne students were grateful to experience first hand what CUPS does at their One World Child Development Centre through working alongside the staff and being able to see some of the children and families CUPS serves. One World is an education program for vulnerable children between the ages of three and six, with the goal of helping each child become “school ready” by the age of six.

From October 2018 to January 2019, two student teams acted as consultants for CUPS – the first focused on creating a social enterprise business model for the CUP’s dental clinic and the second team was tasked with scaling the secret to CUPS’ success:  its resiliency matrix.  Both teams also spent one morning volunteering at the facility.

The power of this project is the multiplier effect: while CUPS benefited, so did the students. The student teams communicated with staff from CUPS and presented their proposals to the representatives. CUPS Executive Director, Carlene Donnelly, attended one of the presentations and was impressed and grateful to see how well the students understood both the challenges and opportunities CUPS faced.

In the words of Patricia Bailey, Director of Development for CUPS and a key partner in the B4Good, “The magic happens when we let each person do what they do best – in this case, business students’ volunteering the skills they’ve developed while pursuing their commerce degrees.”

The experience focused on developing leadership capabilities. From public speaking opportunities, to organizing and coordinating team work to decision-making as well as maintaining commitments in the midst of competing deadlines, the project challenged students to grow.

Jasmeen Gill, a third year BComm student, has participated in the program since its inception.  “Business as a Force for Good has encouraged the development of my leadership capabilities. As a team-lead last winter (2018), I was given the opportunity to apply the skills I learned in the classroom to a project where interpersonal growth was fostered.”

Business as a Force for Good invites all participants to discover new ways of thinking about how they can use their business skills to do well by doing good within the corporate sector and beyond.