HBS alumni participate in volunteer efforts to promote excellence in nonprofit leadership in Connecticut through pro bono consulting, education, grant awards, and related initiatives. They have repeatedly chosen to work with Carver through the years.

Since Community Partners’ formation in 2004, over 275 volunteers have worked on projects with over 175 CT nonprofit organizations, touching the lives of tens of thousands of people throughout CT.

This past year, as described in their 2020 Annual Report, Community Partners built a financial model to assess the value that Carver creates by comparing Carver students’ six-year graduation rates at four-year colleges with their Norwalk Public Schools and national peers.

The team’s methodology included a measure of the net economic value per student. From 2010-2020, 85% of Carver students graduated with a Baccalaureate degree in six years. Nationally, just 11 percent of students from the lowest-income quartile earn bachelor’s degrees within six years (the commonly used indicator of college success), compared with 58 percent of students who come from the highest-income group, according to the Pell Institute. Since 2005, 100% of Carver seniors have graduated high school on time; 100% of Carver seniors enrolled in college immediately following graduation in 2019 and 2020.

In addition to working with Community Partners on a number of consulting projects over time, Community Partners awarded Novelette Peterkin several years ago its annual scholarship to attend the HBS Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management (SPNM) summer program, an intense, one-week session at Harvard taught by HBS faculty. Over 150 nonprofit leaders from around the world, representing a wide range of nonprofit sectors, made up the student body.

Thank you, Harvard Business School Club of CT Community Partners!