The Social Impact Consulting Course provides students an opportunity to learn about consulting from both an academic and applied perspective. Student consulting teams will be invited to work with clients to make a difference, creating positive and sustainable impact for communities and organizations beyond LBJ.
The course is created in partnership with the RGK Center, which has generously offered to source the consulting projects for the Spring 2019 course. Our intention is to have a mix of local and international clients for students to select from. The Social Impact Consulting Course can fulfill one of the four course requirements for the RGK Portfolio Program in Nonprofit Studies.
Course Goals
The course will be designed around four overarching learning goals. Students will have the opportunity to become academically informed and professionally competent in the following:
Developing a high-quality problem statement
Leveraging the power of the consultant-client relationship
Guiding data collection, discovery and analysis
Increasing the probability of client implementation
Format
This is a 3 credit course. 20 student capacity, with a 10 spots for students in the RGK Non-Profit Studies Certificate Program and 10 spots for LBJ Masters Students. The learning is created through the following three distinct components:
Interactive Lectures :
The first 90 minutes of each session will be a content driven, interactive lecture, focusing on academic theories/frameworks, as well as, consulting skills.
Learning Organization Sessions:
During the second 90 minutes of each session, consulting teams will “workshop” challenges/opportunities as it relates to their specific consulting engagement. For these 90 minutes, the class will be invited to operate as a learning organization, with students having responsibility for their own growth/learning as well as responsibility to support and challenge other students’ learning/growth, as we collective develop as consultants and change agents.
Consulting Project:
Student-teams will be fully responsible for the leading their consulting project and delivering results. Student teams will be consistently asked to mine their consulting engagement experience for learnings/insights, using the deliberate practice framework.
The Social Impact Consulting course will be designed and lead by Charlee Garden, LBJ Clinical Professor. Please contact Charlee Garden charlee.garden@utexas.edu with any questions about how the course may fit your learning and career goals.