Melissa Kapadia-Bodi: Penn GSE Doctoral Student and Nonprofit Advocate
Doing my doctorate at GSE has given me the opportunity to take a few electives at the Fels Institute of Government toward a Certificate in Nonprofit Administration. This past spring, I took the first of those courses, called “Fundraising for Nonprofits,” which helped me to think practically about how I can find funding for some of my own nonprofit community work, and also helped me to remember why I’m doing my doctorate in the first place.
Our main assignment for our class was to partner up with a nonprofit in the city and over the course of the semester, create a fundraising plan for the organization. I chose to work with Pennsylvania’s Education for All Coalition (PEAC – www.paedforall.org), which enabled me to learn a lot about the inner workings of a nonprofit organization, and more specifically, to feel connected to PEAC’s work and mission.
At the end of our class, we were asked to present our fundraising plans to the class. Even though the class presentation were supposed to serve as a sort of practice run for the real presentations we’d give to our organizations’ boards of directors in the months following the class, I knew that the presentation I gave to the class would be nothing like the one I’d later give to the board. For starters, my presentation to the class needed to meet certain classroom standards and would determine a large chunk of my final grade; in other words, it had to show an impeccable knowledge of fundraising. On the other hand, my presentation to the board of directors had to be digestible and very practical and most importantly, it had to show an impeccable knowledge of the organization.
The truth is that at the end of a four-month semester, I didn’t feel like an expert on either of these things. I knew quite a lot about fundraising (at least enough to score an A on a multiple choice test) and I felt I knew a great deal about the organization, but I hadn’t been a development officer before and I hadn’t worked within PEAC, so I simply didn’t feel like an expert. While I did well on my presentation to my class, I knew that I would have to create a new Powerpoint and do a deep edit on the plan before presenting it to PEAC.
When I started the class, I think the grade was really important to me, but by the time the semester was over, I realized that I deeply cared about the organization and I wanted to produce a plan that would help PEAC to become a strong fundraising organization. It is this small change that I now aim to achieve in every class I take. At the end of the day, I’m not taking my classes to get grades; I’m taking them so that I can do my best work in the world, and I feel lucky to have professors who challenge me to use my real-world work as the lens through which I see my schoolwork.
Melissa Kapadia-Bodi is a current Penn GSE Doctoral Student as well as a staff member. She is taking classes at the Fels Institute of Government as part of her coursework to pursue her interest in the nonprofit sector. To contact Mel, email her at: melk@gse.upenn.edu
