UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Smeal College of Business Center for the Business of Sustainability has received a $60,000 gift, which will enable the center to involve more students in its annual Undergraduate Sustainability Case Competition.
This gift, which comes from Impact Competition, will be used over the course of three years.
Erik Foley, director of the Center for the Business of Sustainability, said the center hopes that every Smeal student graduates with the commitment to be a change maker.
“Their education in business sustainability equips them with a set of tools to think deeply about the business decisions they make and the impact of them on people and the planet,” Foley said.
The gift from Impact Competition gives students participating in the case competitions more opportunities to grow as business professionals and see the bigger picture of business and solving world issues. The CBoS has facilitated undergraduate case competitions for two years now.
Foley said securing funds each year to facilitate the case competition required an inordinate amount of time. Now, with the gift money, the center can focus less on fundraising and more on expanding the pool of students to include those who wouldn’t previously had the opportunity to participate.
The competition holds its first round remotely, but the finals are always in person. This means travel expenses are involved and Foley noted that in the past, only students who could afford the costs were able to travel to University Park.
“This gift allows us to grow the competition's impact and provide opportunities to participate for more and more students and to help cover some of those travel costs,” Foley said. “It allows us to meet our goal of hosting what we hope is one of the most inclusive sustainability case competitions in the country.”
Smeal has always strived to provide educational equity to its students, said Assistant Dean of Diversity Enhancement for Smeal. He said the college has been working on these Sustainability Case Competitions through a diversity lens.
“When I think of equity for the college, it is making sure that we are looking at all those things through the different lenses to get one set view, one set thought, where we are all coming together to make one cohesive effort,” he said.
Campbell stressed that the objective of the competitions is not only to solve business sustainability issues but to also grow Smeal’s partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities.
Together, Foley and Campbell reached out to Lincoln University and Morgan State University to encourage more diverse students to attend and get involved in these competitions. In a past competition, there were two judges from Morgan State and the overall question to be solved was developed through a collaboration of Penn State, Lincoln State and Morgan State.
“It was just a great collaborative effort,” Campbell recalled. “This gift does a great deal in making sure we can extend the fullest hospitality of University Park to these students who are coming [from historically Black colleges anduniversities] and may have never been here before.”
The gift allows students to extend their stays at University Park to learn and network instead of just coming for the finals then leaving. Many of these students are usually well into their college career already but having them visit gives Campbell the chance to encourage them to look at Penn State for graduate school.
“Any diverse student that we bring to this campus that decides to return has a positive impact,” Campbell said.
The idea to make a gift to Smeal’s Undergraduate Case Competitions came from two alumni, Evan Pollack and Dave Hartman. They approached Smeal’s alumni relations team wishing to fund the competitions and engaged with George Belcher, director of Impact Competition, and Lance Breitstein, founder of Impact Competition.
“It’s widely known how philanthropic the student body of Penn State is with programs like THON, and our organization has various donors that had the philanthropic spirit instilled in them during their time at Penn State,” Breitstein said.
“A partnership between the existing Smeal Sustainability Competition and the Impact Competition seemed like the perfect match to further inspire the students to give back to their communities, help local non-profits and hopefully inspire students to become engaged members of their community with philanthropic goals.”
These individuals from Impact Competition met with Tina Rose, director of professional development and programming at Smeal, who said she loved the idea of supporting these competitions. She pitched the support to the IMPACT Careers Committee in February 2022. The committee also thought it was a great idea, so Rose passed it off to Foley who met Belcher and Breitstein about logistics.
“This partnership between Smeal and the Impact Competition is based upon shared ideals to provide a transformative experiential learning opportunity for students,” Breitstein explained.
Foley emphasized that the case competition is as much about learning as it is about winning.
“The education process is not just about knowledge, it's about practice. That’s where case competitions come in,” said Foley. “We are really passionate about engaged learning and how we provide more opportunities for students to not just learn about these things but also to practice it by working on real problems with real communities and real companies.”
The sustainability competitions also force students to challenge their idea of traditional business objectives of making profitable decisions and appeal to customers, Foley said. Sometimes business isn’t about making successful companies more money or improving software but about focusing on the huge issues that are facing our population and world today.
Foley said he wants students to use the competitions to learn and acquire tools they can use to solve social problems instead of causing them. He encourages them to ask different sets of questions around protecting people's human and labor rights, their health and standing up for equity and inclusion.
“These are all business problems so why would business students not be the first in line to say, ‘hey, we’ve been a part of the problem, so maybe we can be part of the solution,’” Foley said. “These competitions help students actually see and experience how businesses can play such a powerful role in helping to address and resolve some of these really huge issues.”
For the third annual sustainability competition, which is already under way, the question and solution is focused on decreasing the number of people affected by hunger and food insecurity.
With the record-breaking success of “A Greater Penn State for 21st Century Excellence,” which raised $2.2 billion from 2016 to 2022, philanthropy is helping to sustain the University’s mission of education, research and service to communities across the commonwealth and around the globe. Scholarships enable Penn State to open doors and welcome students from every background, support for transformative experiences allows students and faculty to fulfill their vast potential for leadership, and gifts toward discovery and excellence help serve and impact the world. To learn more about the impact of giving and the continuing need for support, please visit www.raise.psu.edu.