By Sanaz Memarsadeghi

SIPA Net Impact’s mission is to use the power of business to improve the world and it seeks to educate, equip and inspire its members to use their business skills for social impact.

Now entering its third year of being an official student group at SIPA, Net Impact (NI) is expanding its active student base and launching new initiatives.

Thus far into the semester NI has held a general assembly meeting and a happy hour, in addition to sponsoring two speaking events as part of its social entrepreneur speaker series. The speakers included Ravi Gulati, founder of the Indian NGO Manzil, and Tony Meloto, founder of the Filipino NGO, Gawad Kalinga. The next speaker that NI will be hosting is John Wood, founder of the NGO Room to Read and author of the book Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. This event, which will be co-sponsored by the Business School NI chapter, will take place April 1.

Net Impact is also proud to be co-sponsoring the first-ever Global Public Policy Case Competition, scheduled for April 10. For this event, SIPA students form teams and compete in analyzing and presenting a solution to a real public policy problem. There will be expert judges from Deloitte, which is sponsoring the event and providing the case, and Dalberg who will select the winning team.

A workshop on social impact analysis is also planned for April, as is a networking happy hour with the Microfinance Working Group, the Business School NI Chapter, and other campus groups, under the theme of social enterprise. An Earth Day event is also being planned.

A priority for the semester will be to lay the groundwork for the new Board Fellows program so that it may begin in Fall 2009. This program will match SIPA students to a local NGO, where they will serve as a non-voting member of its Board of Directors for a six-month period. Board Fellows also work on a special board project which may focus on fundraising, marketing, strategy, human resources management, or other fields.

What many students may not know is that NI is not just a SIPA student group; it is an international nonprofit organization that was created in 1993. Today, NI has more than 10,000 members in 200 graduate student and professional chapters worldwide. There are two NI chapters at Columbia University, one at SIPA and another at the Business School. The SIPA chapter of NI was founded in 2006 as a result of the merger of the Corporate Social Responsibility Network and the Social Enterprise Club.