Operation wish: undergraduate and MBA students work collaboratively to help wishes come true

Fifty-five students, forty-three days, six teams, two classes and one community partner—this sets the scene for an innovative undergraduate and MBA class pairing, in which Dr. Tim Palmer, professor of management, and Dr. Derrick McIver, assistant professor of management, have designed their courses to have overlapping meeting times and the opportunity for students to work collaboratively on fundraising projects that will benefit Make-A-Wish® Michigan.

Each student team created a fundraising campaign that will benefit the nonprofit organization, which grants wishes to two-and-a-half to 18-year-olds who are facing life-threatening medical conditions. The organization has four main categories of wishes:

• GO: A child can ask to travel to a destination that will be meaningful and fun.
• MEET: A child can request to meet someone such as a singer, actor, director, author or other prominent social figure.
• HAVE: A wish kid can ask for an item such as a swimming pool or a shopping spree.
• BE: Kids can ask to be something—options range from superheroes to celebrities—and the experience is created around that dream.

These wishes bring hope into the life of the child and his or her family members, as they all deal with that child’s serious medical condition. And the variety of wishes is as vast as children’s imaginations.

Why did undergraduate and graduate courses in management take on community fundraising projects? There were a couple of important curricular goals being achieved. “Community-based service-learning helps our students understand the powerful ability of organizations to leverage their resources to improve society,” says Palmer. “This project was a perfect fit for an undergraduate class titled ‘Business and Society.’” And for the MBA students, this was an opportunity to learn leadership and project management skills. “An experiential or active service-learning project such as this helps students develop, hone and test their team leadership skills while immersing them in an unforgettable community-based challenge,” says McIver.

The WMU professors borrowed the structure and idea for the challenge from Dr. Adam Grant, of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, who developed a similar service-learning challenge with Make-A-Wish®  as a partner, and has adapted it several times for his courses.

Students met with Brooke Jevicks, development director with Make-A-Wish Michigan, who presented on the organization’s mission, answered students’ key questions, and brainstormed with the teams about fundraising ideas.

Students worked to raise as much money as possible in 43 days to make the wishes of children in southwest Michigan come true.