On November 5th, seventeen CPPA students visited three organizations in Cambridge, MA, as part of CPPA’s Professional Development course.
The day began with a tour of Root Capital‘s new Cambridge headquarters guided by CPPA alumnus Jennifer Neira ’07. Root Capital is a nonprofit social investment fund that pioneers finance for grassroots business in rural areas of developing countries. It began in 1999, providing loans to coffee cooperatives in Latin America, and has expanded rapidly since then, now working in 30 countries in Latin America and Africa.
Next, the CPPA students met with alumnus Kevin Greer ’09 at New Profit. A nonprofit organization, New Profit provides support to social entrepreneurs and their organizations and pursue a set of social innovation strategies to improve their entrepreneurial environments. Portfolio investments are focused on innovative nonprofit organizations with the potential to create significant, long-term impact on the social mobility of low-income Americans, for they hope to overcome America’s biggest challenges in education, workforce development, public health, and poverty, and the barriers that prevent them from being solved.
The visit came to an end at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) on the MIT campus with Iqbal Dhaliwal, the global Director of Policy for J-PAL. A network of fifty-one affiliated professors around the world united by their use of Randomized Evaluations (REs) to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation, their mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence. To do this, they conduct rigorous impact evaluations, build capacity by providing expertise to people interested in evaluation, and impact policy with analysis of the most effective ways to achieve policy goals and dissemination of this knowledge to policymakers in governments, NGOs, foundations, and international development organizations.
The professional development course provides CPPA students with knowledge and analytic tools to manage their own career development, and provides them with opportunities to meet and network with professionals from a variety of public service careers in a series of panel discussions and professional development events.