Nonprofit Deep Dive
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Our events this semester that highlighted local organizations and the inner workings of them!
December 3, 2018
Giving Tuesday just passed, but CS + Social Good’s social entrepreneurship team recently held two different events encouraging students to learn more about and interact with nonprofits & social enterprises in the Atlanta area!
Our first event was our first ever Nonprofit Career Fair, where students had the opportunity to interact with seven different organizations from around the Atlanta area doing work to help others. The following organizations/companies were in attendance: Kabbage, oStem, Code for Atlanta, Goodr, Black Girls Who Code, Streetcat.media, and the Greenhouse Accelerator. Kabbage, a billion dollar startup, helps financing for small businesses. Many students spoke with their representatives for internship or full-time opportunities, especially since they are a technology company (and Georgia Tech is a tech school). Other organizations were marketing their volunteer opportunities. oStem is an org on campus that works on increasing opportunity for the LGBTQ community in technology. Streetcat.media is a local organization that helps set up workshops for crafting, and Code for Atlanta is a city-wide organization that gets students to use their coding abilities to create governmental change. A notable startup there was Goodr. They are a growing social enterprise that reallocates excess foods to the people who need it. They all loved speaking to the students here, and we hope the 50+ attendees who came opened their eyes to opportunities that are not the traditional ones you can find at a career fair.
Following up to this event, if students were more interested in founding a nonprofit as opposed to joining one, we had a great speaker event with Ian Cohen, founder of Next Generation Men & Women, former Teach for America teacher, and advisor at the Center for Civic Innovation. We had Jimmy John’s over some great conversation; he started off by telling us about his own story and how he entered the field of social work. He was inspired by his time at Teach for America to help students achieve their dreams by showing them the steps necessary to reach them. His journey in founding a successful nonprofit, though, had twists and turns, and he emphasized his lessons from them. He told students to always keep the person affected by the problem in mind, since often times a solution is created without a complete understanding of who the solution is built for. This advice extends past nonprofits to social enterprise and any startup in general! We hope to work with the Center for Civic Innovation in the future to help students get involved in hands-on learning with social impact, so keep a look out for that!
Our team had a great time organizing these events, and we are very glad the attendees enjoyed them as well! We had one more event this semester that we will talk about in an upcoming article, but other than that, we are excited for the end of the semester & are excited for the next one! If you have any feedback on our events or have some you’d like to see, feel free to reach out to us on Facebook! We would love to hear it and look forward to seeing you at an event soon!
~CS + Social Good @ Georgia Tech
— Written by Vadini Agrawal
Learn more about CS + Social Good here!
