The third way to use your MBA

When courses hook up with charities, everyone wins. By Martin Thompson

Andy has been out of prison six months. It was his first sentence and he is determined that it will be his last. While inside, he was able to enlist the help of the Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT), a charity that provides practical support to prisoners and their families. He joined PACT’s Basic Caring Communities project, which matches a trained volunteer with a prisoner approaching the end of their sentence and goes on to provide support through the first six months of life on the outside. Its aim is to prevent re-offending and successfully integrate former inmates back into society.

“Prisoners may come out homeless, drug addicted and with £60 in their pocket,” explains Andrew Keen-Downs, PACT’s director. “Reconviction rates are between 60 and 80 per cent within two years. The first few months after release are a critical time.”

This has been a trial project and PACT, which has a Christian ethos, needs to evaluate its impact. Keen-Downs says: “We have to make sure we are spending our money wisely and are helping to prevent re-offending. Looking beyond the bare statistics, we want to be able to assess the changes that occur within people after they leave prison. However, we lacked any empirical research tools with which we could measure these changes and this is why we approached Manchester Business School to help us.”

Daniel Taffler is one of the group of five MBA students that has been assigned to work with PACT. His background is in financial accounting and business strategy. Daniel and his fellow students have been devising a performance management framework, which the charity’s volunteers will be using to review their work with ex-offenders. So far, the process has involved the students in interviewing volunteers, PACT staff and former prisoners to get a sense of the key issues they face.

“The framework we have devised includes criteria that cover an ex-prisoner’s emotional state,” explains Taffler. “For example, volunteers can assess how satisfied he is with his current accommodation. Having processed the answers, the charity can gauge whether real progress is being made. This appraisal exercise is also very topical as it fits in with the Government’s wish to see an overall reduction in rates of re-offending.”

“We are a practice-based MBA and this is the first of three projects that our students undertake for real clients,” says course director Elaine Ferneley. “In this case, we team our MBAs up with a third sector organisation such as PACT to carry out a major piece of work for them on a consultancy basis one day a week over a three-month period. An as well as PACT, we have 25 other not-for-profit organisations that work with our MBAs on a wide range of issues.”

These include Mines Advisory Group (MAG, which helps prevent mine casualties in current and former conflict zones. Some students have created a strategic marketing plan to raise awareness and highlight MAG’s profile for the corporate sector. Others work with Action For Sustainable Living, which encourages people and organisations in the city to become more environmentally aware by taking small steps such as increasing recycling and becoming more energy conscious in the home.

What do the Manchester MBA students gain from this involvement with the voluntary sector? “These organisations face many of the same challenges you find in the business world but that are more acute,”

Ferneley explains. “We want our students to realise there are lessons that can be learned from these charitable organisations. We can then use these examples in the classroom. Beyond the potential for learning, we are helping students to realise that, as business professionals, they have a wider social responsibility.”

Course leader Patrick Hoverstadt points to other benefits of practical learning. “Working in a multidisciplinary group on a project like this pulls together many threads of the curriculum: systems theory, economics, psychology and ethics. Traditional teaching has to separate out those subjects,” he says.

Taffler agrees. “It’s valuable to have the project work running at the same time as our core courses. Theoretical learning is great, but it’s only part of the story until it is actually applied in the real world. This is a real opportunity to really make a difference and contribute to an excellent charity.

Having said that, we were very aware of the danger of being seen as people in suits telling the staff and volunteers how we think they should be doing things. We are not there to tell them to change their behaviour but to give them the tools they have asked for to measure their own work.”

For Taffler, working closely with fellow students from different cultures is another major plus point. “Our group includes an Italian civil engineer, an Indian actuary and a Peruvian who has worked with young offenders in Lima. Being part of such a multidisciplinary team is an incredibly rich experience. Each of us brings a different perspective to the project.”

The Basic Caring Communities project has been piloted in several prisons, but before PACT can expand it to other areas, it needs firm evidence that it is working. So far, test runs with the Manchester students’ performance management framework have gone well, with good feedback from volunteers and former offenders alike.

This will be many Manchester MBA students’ first contact with the third sector. Elaine Ferneley points out that the new political drive for localism will mean a greater role for charitable organisations such as PACT. “The boundaries will begin to blur and there is going to be a real need for business people to understand how they can work with these voluntary organisations.

Some of the inspirational individuals behind these enterprises have incredible skills that students may not come across in the corporate world. The lessons they learn from engaging with these organisations and the people who run them will stay with them for life,” she says.