One professor at the West campus has found a way to balance education with giving back to the community.
Philip Mizzi, an associate professor in the School of Global Management and Leadership, integrated his economics courses with an opportunity to serve. The project, developed in 1994, became known as Management Social Opportunity.
Since the start of the project nearly 15 years ago, Mizzi and students have found ways to save the Phoenix chapter of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul millions of dollars.
This semester, the students are working on another program to help the society, which serves homeless and economically disadvantaged people.
“We are working on a project now to help improve the society’s dining room for families with small children and to hopefully expand service to the weekend,” he said.
Working in cooperation with St. Vincent’s, Mizzi assigned students to participate in the charity in a variety of ways related to business management.
“We decided by a vote of the faculty to find a way to get involved substantially in our community,” Mizzi said.
Mizzi said his plans for community service began small. He and his students originally spent every third Friday serving meals in the soup kitchen at St. Vincent’s. Students were required to write a reflection on their service experience afterward.
Global business junior Yevgeniya Rouban said the work is rewarding.
“It also makes you realize how many people are less fortunate and need people to donate their time and resources to them,” she said.
Rouban, along with other volunteers from her class, set up tables, served food to families, and helped to clean up afterward. She also made crafts with the families’ children.
“I’m actually planning on going again around Thanksgiving,” Rouban said.
Over time, the course garnered more attention, and Management Social Opportunity was asked to take a bigger part in the program.
“We got involved in management issues [such] as the society’s board, and management began to see the value our students could provide the organization,” Mizzi said.
Students then got an opportunity to learn firsthand and apply what they already knew about financial management.
Gabriela Bova, manager of volunteer services at St. Vincent de Paul, said Mizzi and his students help St. Vincent’s plan special events.
“Mizzi is very active in our board and provides knowledgeable people to work with us as needed,” she said.
Mizzi recruited Mohan Gopalakrishnan, an associate professor who is director of the West campus’ Center for Productivity, Innovation and Quality, to help devise a financial plan to determine what could be improved in St. Vincent de Paul’s charity system.
“Our studies showed inefficiencies in the system,” Gopalakrishnan said. “A lot of food was being wasted, and so our primary goal was to eliminate the waste and increase the number of mouths that are fed.”
The students were instructed by Mizzi to look at successful businesses and corporations and examine how their distribution systems work.
They would pick from these businesses what seemed to be effective and determine how best to apply it to St. Vincent de Paul, Gopalakrishnan said.
He said he and the students decided that instead of building a new warehouse for the charity’s booming donations, it would be more cost-effective to simply improve the efficiency of its existing one.
That decision saved the charity more than $2.5 million, Mizzi said.
“The good news about this story is that we didn’t take any St. Vincent money,” Gopalakrishnan said.
Instead, the program looked to grants and donations from companies like Motorola to provide them with the funds necessary to innovate.
Reach the reporter at joshua.snyder@asu.edu.
