Frank Brown, CIS of Atlanta's new Black CEO, was keen to extend CIS's well-honed case management in schools program to youth in college. Founded 50 years ago by Bill Milliken, CIS, a network of 110 affiliates, had built a strong program of assisting and supporting youth in poverty schools to complete their high school education. CIS Atlanta's thrust which would be a new stretch for the network had the strong backing of the network's new national CEO, Rey Saldana, a CIS alum himself. Under Saldana, the organization had won two major grants of $133.5 million and $165 million recently, which could be put to use. The case wrestles with the question of what should the network do? What should the Atlanta affiliate do?

The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative direct sales force model. Jesse Moore, the founder, wished to scale the company through organic growth as well as geographical expansion into Nigeria. The strategy called for decisions on product/service offerings and go-to-market options. On the product side the company had increasingly migrated to larger in-home connected electronic and electrical devices. It had to decide how much further to go. On the go-to-market side its innovative Direct Service Representative network was hard to create and manage, and it had to think if there were viable alternatives.

Founded in 2012, the END fund focused on eliminating five Neglected Tropical Diseases that accounted for 80% of the tropical diseases affecting nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide. Its roughly $25 million/year annual budget was fully committed when it got news that the British Government would be cutting back its funding for the sector, putting at risk nearly 50,000 people for a tropical disease (visceral leishmaniasis-VL), which the End Fund was currently not addressing. The case question is whether the End Fund should redirect its resources to VL. The case highlights the difficult decisions that nonprofits have to make balancing resource stretch and mission focus.

Founded in 2012, the END fund focused on eliminating five Neglected Tropical Diseases that accounted for 80% of the tropical diseases affecting nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide. Its roughly $25 million/year annual budget was fully committed when it got news that the British Government would be cutting back its funding for the sector, putting at risk nearly 50,000 people for a tropical disease (visceral leishmaniasis-VL), which the End Fund was currently not addressing. The case question is whether the End Fund should redirect its resources to VL. The case highlights the difficult decisions that noprofits have to make balancing resource stretch and mission focus.

Founded by the husband and wife team of Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta in 1999, Goonj had quickly emerged as one of the leading disaster relief and rural development organizations in India. Their main mode of development was through providing a clothing kit to the village families in return for development work (Cloth for Work). As Covid-19 struck India in March 2020, the organization pivoted its operational model to considerably broaden its set of activities in the field. In 2022 after nearly 70% of the country had been vaccinated against Covid-19, and with a semblance of normalcy returning, Anshu Gupta had to consider the future of the organization and its strategy, having raised twice the amount of funds ($20 million) as in the previous years.

The Freedom Fund founded in 2013 to end modern slavery had raised more than half its intended target (by 2025) of $200 million. In 2021, impressed by its decentralized-partnering style of operations, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott awarded the Fund a gift of $35 million over 5 years. The beauty of the gift was that it came with no strings attached. It was completely unrestricted for use the way the company's management and staff deemed fit. Nick Grono, the organization's first CEO was wrestling with the question of how to put the money to best use.

The Freedom Fund (B) case describes the management's plan of how to use the windfall of $35 million granted by philanthropist Mackenzie Scott. The case also describes the process by which the decisions were arrived at.

The OneTen case study examines the nonprofit organization's origin story. Its founding team includes a roster of corporate superstars-Ken Chenault (former CEO of American Express), Ken Frazier (former CEO of Merck), Charles Phillips (chair of Infor), Ginni Rometty (former CEO of IBM), and Kevin Sharer (former CEO and chair of Amgen). In May 2020, soon after the murder of George Floyd, this group came together to form a nonprofit that would partner with companies, talent developers, and Black talent, with the goal of hiring one million Black people in the U.S. into jobs with family-sustaining wages over the next 10 years. Equally important is an emphasis on the promotion of talented Black employees within existing companies. The case is set in late 2020, just after the hire of OneTen's first CEO, Maurice Jones; it explores how the organization was established, structured, and staffed, and how it has so far built its partnerships.

In March 2020, Second Harvest Heartland, one of six Foodbanks serving Minnesota, was caught in the COVID-19 emergency with considerably more people exposed to hunger and food insecurity. Its management team led by CEO Allison O' Toole and COO Theirry Ibri alertly managed the crisis by improvising and implementing new programs. In August 2021, with signs of the crisis behind them, they had to decide which of the adaptations they should keep, and how to go back to addressing their original mission of ending hunger.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands such as Allbirds, Casper, Peloton, and Warby Parker have creatively found a weakness in the marketing citadel of incumbent brands. By using data gleaned from daily interactions with customers, these brands have been able to adapt how they serve their unique customer communities across a start-to-finish purchase journey. The best of them have parlayed that ability into a profitable business model applied across multiple channels and customer segments. But as successful DTC brands mature, they must recognize the need to evolve. The authors offer four principles for continued success: (1) Focus on deepening customer relationships, not just making comparisons with competitors. (2) Accompany the customer beyond the initial transaction. (3) Omnichannel is about value addition, not cost reduction. (4) Strengthen the core first; consider extensions later.

In the wake of George Floyd's killing in May 2020, and widespread protests for social justice in the United States, OneTen was formed by a coalition of 40 large companies to provide one million jobs for African-Americans in 10 years. The case describes the background of the labor market in the U.S. and specifically the disparity in opportunities for Black Americans, which was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes the effort by government agencies and particularly a nonprofit-YearUp-to address the labor market gaps. The case asks students to analyse the underlying problems and formulate recommendations. The case allows students to understand and distinguish between a system level problem and one that manifests itself at an organizational level. It calls for action planning at an organizational level but one calling for considerable coordination and collaboration across the entire labor supply eco-system.

In 2018, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in a bold move transferred all its assets to a fund pooled with other General Partners and Limited Partners, called Blue Meridian Partners, to focus substantial long range investments in a few carefully chosen nonprofits. The fund was intended to find proven, scalable solutions to problems that trapped America's young people in poverty. In addition to discussing the merits and demerits of this new approach to philanthropy, the case poses questions on two particular investments (Youth Villages and Nurse Family Partners) and whether they should receive the next tranche of investments. The (B) case, situated in 2020, describes the many quick decisions taken by the fund in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the calls for social justice, and raises the question of whether and how these decisions are aligned with the long range strategy of the fund.

The (B) case situated in 2020 describes the many quick decisions taken by the fund in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the calls for social justice, and raises the question of whether and how these decisions are aligned with the long range strategy of the fund.

The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative direct sales force model. Jesse Moore, the founder, wished to scale the company through organic growth as well as geographical expansion into Nigeria. The strategy called for decisions on product/service offerings and go-to-market options. On the product side the company had increasingly migrated to larger in-home connected electronic and electrical devices. It had to decide how much further to go. On the go-to-market side its innovative Direct Service Representative network was hard to create and manage, and it had to think if there were viable alternatives.

Dasra, a pioneer in the Indian Strategic Philanthropy space founded by a husband and wife team, had grown and evolved with the fast changing philanthropy scene in India. By 2017 it had managed to raise nearly $100 million of new capital for NGOs and Nonprofits in India. At the same time, the rapid growth demanded internal changes that stretched the organization and raised questions regarding structures, systems and capabilities.

The case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion-the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company's business strategy and its go-to-market operations. Michael Dell founded Dell Inc. in 1984 to assemble PCs. The company quickly became the market share leader by the end of the century. By 2008 (before the recession), Dell had expanded into servers, networking and storage, as well as services. Still, the hardware market was beginning to commoditize, with the trend accelerating after the recession. EMC, founded in 1979, had a similar story. It became the dominant player in data storage through early 2000 only to find that new technologies and nimble competitors were putting its business under severe commodity pressure by the turn of the century. Thus in 2015, when Dell made a $67 billion acquisition of EMC, many knowledgeable IT industry observers found it hard to comprehend the logic of two commodity/hardware players coming together. By then, most enterprises, large and small, were eyeing digital transformation. Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud seemed to be serving their needs. Thus Michael Dell had to carefully construct a strategic position for the newly constituted Dell company in the rapidly evolving IT market space. In addition, Dell and EMC also had to decide how to merge their Go-to-Market operations to gain the synergies promised by the merger. Dell had over 365,000 customers and EMC nearly 430,000. Dell had 17,000 salespeople and EMC, 7,000. Each had over 10,000 channel partners. Adding a wrinkle to the merger was a third actor, VMware, an independently listed cloud software company, 80% owned by the new Dell Technologies entity. Integrating their software capability would be an exciting opportunity and a challenge.

As the Ebola outbreak threatens the fragile health system of Liberia, Raj Panjabi, the founder of Last Mile Health, faces a dilemma: should he expand beyond the organization's core mission to help the country build emergency health care capacity, or should he stick to his knitting? Panjabi, a Liberian who immigrated with his family to the United States during the Liberian Civil War, founded Last Mile Health as a non-profit organization to recruit and train community health workers to reach remote rural communities with basic health services. The case traces the founding and early years of Last Mile Health, before the organization has to decide whether they pursue a significant amount of new funding to expand into other areas.