Ten-Day Study Visit seminar in Paris for 25 Social Leadership MBA Students
of the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and management
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The Delegation taking part in this Study Visit was composed of the twenty-five students In the Mandel Social Leadership MBA.
The Mandel MBA in Social Leadership is a program that combines high-level theoretical content with a permanent concern with drawing students' attention to the practice and application of knowledge. This latter objective leads each year to, among other things, students taking a seminar abroad on the issues and concerns of the nonprofit sector.
The motivation for this seminar comes first of all simply from the fact that there are obvious facts which are no longer obvious when we want to put them into practice in another context. The aim of the seminar is, therefore, to help put acquired knowledge into perspective, and above all, by working in a different context, to seek new ideas and induce a desire to question both theory and practice.
In general, these seminars have been organized and have taken place in the United States and France, alternating yearly between the two. The justification for this is that the United States appears to be the country par excellence in which the voluntary sector has enormous potential, the freedom to define its strategies, and the capacity to implement them. But at the same time, the State is weak and often concedes certain elementary responsibilities to the voluntary sector. On the other hand, France is a country with an extremely strong State that takes enormous care of social needs, but which has an essentially opportunistic nonprofit sector that is slave to the State's expectations.
Thus, year after year, students acquire different insights that they then confront in our work with the graduates.
This year, the seminar consisted of two parts: the first of three days focused on visiting organizations such as Les Apprentis d'Auteuil, the Rafael Institute, etc. and a corporate visit at EDF under the theme of sustainability and corporate social responsibility.
The second part consisted of a real-world case analysis. The aim of this exercise is two-fold: The organization hosting the students benefits from the production of a document identifying an organizational challenge, and a proposal endeavoring to meet that challenge from students specially trained for this.
For students, this was an opportunity to be exposed to a case study in an international context.
The exercise began with an "in the field" process that is initiated by a sequence of two meetings on two consecutive days spent working within an organization.
During the first meeting, members of each organization introduced its issues to the students. All of these interventions of necessity ended with a question and answer session. Following this session, site visits were arranged.
Following these meetings, the 4 to 5 students in each group took a half-day to reflect on the subject they chose to explore.
The next day meeting provided the students an opportunity to meet certain members of the organizations to ask questions they deemed necessary to decide on the subjects that interested them and to verify the feasibility of it. They were able to request access to certain documents.
On the last day, a panel of examiners was organized which necessarily included the director or a representative of the organization that received the delegation and the Ben-Gurion University professor who heads the delegation. These two people may also have added members of their own organizations.
Each student group was required to give a 20-minute to justify their subject and to explain how they would planned to deal with it. The panel judged the feasibility of each. The director of each institution had the final say on subject approval because he/she is the best able to judge the interest of such research for his/her organization. All the proposals were approved
Once the subject was approved, students were given 2 months to submit to the host organization and their professor a 10-page paper detailing the organizational challenge chosen and their proposed solutions. Graduation depends on the results of this real-world case analysis.
This exercise constitutes an excellent opportunity for our students to work with a challenging topic in a foreign environment. It contributes in educating and training them as leaders in nonprofits.
The organizations that welcomed our students and benefited from their consulting were: Scale Changer, 1001 Fontaines, Tsars Voyage, Lamorim, APF France Handicap
