“This college cannot fail to succeed. Before long, it will develop on a large scale. It will be one of the most powerful means for good in this country.”
This well-known quote from Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C, founder of Notre Dame, is a part of the fabric of our beloved University. It defines the spirit of our faculty, students, alumni and extended family of all those who love and embrace the mission of Our Lady’s University. This quote also served as the inspiration for the aptly named Powerful Means Initiative that I have the honor to lead.
The genesis for the Powerful Means Initiative (PMI) began as most exciting ideas do – on the back of a napkin. In 2015, I was meeting with friend and colleague Matt Alverson ’01, ideating on what the future of high impact design thinking projects could be for our ND students. How could we support the interest of the students in applying what they are learning in the classroom to make a real impact – and to serve as a powerful means for good?
PMI began to take shape during spring semester 2020. My project for the Innovation & Design Thinking class involved St. Bakhita Vocational Training Center (SBVTC) in Northern Uganda. Soon after I traveled to St. Bakhita with 10 students during that spring break, the University moved to online courses to navigate the COVID pandemic. Many of the I&D students were seniors and many had their start dates for their new jobs delayed.
As I’ve come to learn from my past 14 years with the incredible young women and men that make up our Notre Dame student body, the students did not view a delayed start date as an opportunity to lean out and binge-watch shows. Rather, they saw this as an opportunity to lean in and amplify their impact on projects they cared about. Many of the students from my class stayed engaged with the St. Bakhita project and began strategizing on how to implement ideas that originated from the course.
Another truth that I've continued to have reinforced from my time at Notre Dame is that we have an incredible community of alumni, family and friends! The parents of one of my former students made a gift endowing experiential learning for my classes, and after seeing the passion and potential impact from projects with Saint Bakhitas, offered to provide additional support to get the implementation phase of the project off the ground!
We got to work putting the needed infrastructure in place to help implement the ideas, including establishing agreements between the University and the Archdiocese of Gulu, completing needed infrastructure updates so the school could reopen post-COVID, providing tuition support for the young women in the region to be able to attend school and securing a trusted team to lead the school. (A big thank you to our amazing head of school, Victoria Nyanjura (MGA ‘20).)
Nearly four years later, the initial project partner has become the proof of concept for what is possible when the Notre Dame family comes together to make a meaningful impact by using business as a force for good, as highlighted in the 2022 “What Would You Fight For?” series. The Saint Bakhita project and all that is possible has become the cornerstone of PMI.
Today, PMI has grown to encompass an academic track (Impact Consulting minor, research and internships), an investment vehicle (Powerful Means Fund) and a campus-wide student services club (Innovation 4 Impact).
The Impact Consulting minor incorporates a series of classes that provide students with a path to engaging with project partners throughout classes over multiple semesters:
- Innovation & Design Thinking: Building empathy with stakeholders and engaging in collaborative innovation.
- Design Thinking Immersion: Spending time on the ground with the project partner, conducting research and testing prototypes.
- Applied Impact Consulting: Managing the project and the budget to implement ideas in a sustainable way.
- Designing Your Life: Reflecting on purpose and intentionally using time and talents in service to others.
Students have the opportunity to continue working on projects with the partner over summer or winter breaks with paid research fellowships and internships.
To enable collaborative innovations to have a meaningful impact, PMI supports the student-led investment vehicle, the Powerful Means Fund (PMF). PMF currently is focused on providing micro-grants and student mentorship for early stage initiatives and seeding micro-loans for partner-centric Village Savings and Loan Accounts for partner recipients to borrow from for needed capital for their entrepreneurial endeavors. Students provide mentorship and training, track the investments and measure the social impact, which is reported out annually in the IM-ND (Impact Metrics-Notre Dame) report.
The Innovation 4 Impact Club offers an opportunity for students who are not enrolled in the minor or the management of the fund to work on social impact projects. Examples of what club verticals are working on this semester include:
- Biogas: Installing one unit at the school over spring break with the hopes of expanding to the broader community as a safer and more sustainable way to cook.
- Early Childhood Development Center: Helping with the development of a curriculum and providing themed learning units for the center for the new ECDC that was developed with a collaboration with ND Architecture.
- Storytelling: Capturing images of locals to create a book similar to the Humans of New York to tell the story of the resilient members of the Kalongo community.
Each club vertical has an industry advisor composed of an awe-inspiring group of alumni and friends.
The top priorities for next stage of PMI are to expand the number of students involved in the work, to identify the second project partner and to continue to collaborate with other colleges across campus to contribute to the ecosystem of high-impact experiential learning that makes a meaningful impact, working together across the Notre Dame family to serve as a Powerful Means.
PMI would not be where it is today without the more than 500 students who have contributed to this work through the Innovation & Design Thinking courses over the past four years; the nearly 100 students who have participated in the immersions through spending time on the ground conducting research and building, testing and implementing ideas in Uganda with our first project partner; and the foundational team of alumni who worked on these projects as students and still make time to contribute to the work today, including Alex Potts ‘23, Grace Kamholz ‘23, Carlos Flores ‘23, Abbie Hagerty ‘23, Joanna Helm ‘23, Olivia Coyle ‘22, Megan Baumbach ‘22, Bruce Morris ‘20, Kendyl Pettit ‘20, Alice Breummer ‘20, and Joe Bialous ‘20. A special note of gratitude to Quin Gallagher ‘21, who we are lucky enough to have working on the initiative full-time as the program coordinator! And of course to our dean, Martijn Cremers, for enabling the entrepreneurial culture in Mendoza to make this work a reality.
And a huge note of gratitude for the Powerful Means Circle whose mentorship and support every step of the way to not only me, but to countless ND students, to serve as a powerful means to help build a lasting legacy of transformative impact. Thank you, Mark Pulido and Donna Walker, Cindy Stark ‘81 and Paul Stark ‘80, Matt Alverson ‘01, Dr. Carrie Quinn ‘96, and our newest members, Mike Neumann ‘98 and Melanie Neumann (SMC ‘98).
In Notre Dame,
Wendy
Wendy Pfromm Angst
Teaching Professor, Management & Organization
Director, Powerful Means Initiative
Director, Impact Consulting Minor
