The Big Easy (as New Orleans is affectionately called) hasn’t had the easiest last several years, but a team of DePaul MBA students is doing its part to help the city’s local businesses.
From flickr user dam
Instead of spending their spring breaks on a beach or in front of a TV, the DePaul MBA students are spending the week consulting with Naked Pizza, a New Orleans-based all-natural pizzeria, as part of the inaugural “IDEAcorps Entrepreneurship Challenge.”
For the challenge, teams representing top business schools nationwide (including DePaul!) are using their business knowledge to give back to the New Orleans community. From DePaul’s Newsroom:
MBA student Lucas Weingarten of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, who organized DePaul’s team and was part of two previous business school volunteer trips to New Orleans, said the students stepped up to help plan the friendly challenge because of a “genuine interest among my colleagues to not only apply our skills to real business issues and gain practical experience, but also to help ventures that give back to the New Orleans community.
“We want to represent DePaul’s service mission and the business school in the most effective and engaging way we can,” he said.
For those business travelers out there, Lucas also was quoted and pictured making a pizza pie in yesterday’s USA Today.
Want to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on the weeklong challenge? Take a look at the Idea Village blog, which features posts by a number of students taking part in the challenge.
What an awesome idea. Really cool service–building in curriculum and an alternative spring break. You should get the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization involved next year.
Cool project!