By Lisa Xiao ‘18
On Friday, February 27 – Sunday, March 1, six representatives from the Johns Hopkins Students Consulting for Non-profit Organizations (SCNO) traveled to the University of Pittsburgh for the annual SCNO National Conference. The six students were Kaushik Rao (President, 2015), Andrew Austin (VP of Administration, 2015), Melissa Delgado (2016), Dylan Pulver (2017), Alessandra Golden (2018), and Lisa Xiao (2018). The 2015 SCNO National Conference brought together SCNO chapters from across the nation over a weekend filled with workshops, seminars, and networking events regarding consulting and nonprofits.
JHU SCNO members at the SCNO National Conference at Pittsburgh University.
SCNO has chapters across the nation, each working with local non-profit organizations to provide strategic consulting services while fostering opportunities for student members to gain practical consulting experience. Since its founding, members have developed a passion for services to the community and professional development. Engagements conducted involve fundraising & capital allocation, operational management, and finance & accounting initiatives. All the work done is on a pro-bono basis.
With the Johns Hopkins chapter founded only in 2011, this conference served as an invaluable opportunity to network with other chapter across the nation. We exchanged chapter management best practices and gained ideas for future developments. In fact, many conference participants expressed that one of the most interesting seminars was one on chapter sustainability strategy. SCNO chapters face a high turnover rate, because students generally graduate in 3-5 years. By sharing each chapter’s transitional strategies and organizational structures, we discussed long-term strategies to sustain our chapters.
The conference also held a strong focus on personal and professional development. In a leadership and mentorship seminar with Councilman Tom Baker, he discussed how to combat the challenges faced as a leader of SCNO. In a subsequent breakout session, members of the national board facilitated a roundtable discussion on project best practices. As many of them are now established young professionals in the consulting industry, they were able to synthesize our ideas into concrete strategies in project management that we could bring back to our chapters. We discussed the operational side of projects, from the consulting framework to managing consulting as a team lead.
Other seminars included “Consulting for Nonprofits” by a senior consultant at the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University, “You’re Hired,” and “Consulting at Deloitte” by a Business Technology Analyst and SCNO alumnus at Deloitte.
This weekend was an excellent opportunity for the Johns Hopkins SCNO chapter to engage in networking and learning opportunities in consulting and nonprofits while contributing back to SCNO on a national scale by offering insights on chapter and project management.
If you are interested in learning more about SCNO or have any questions, please email [email protected] or visit www.jhu.edu/scno.