Kelly Kreiser
January 15, 2010
Interviewer: Carol Hammond
Re: Thunderbird for Good
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director: Diane Nevill
Transcribed by: Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona
HAMMOND: This is Carol Hammond. I’m the associate vice-president for Information Services at Thunderbird School of Global Management. Today is January 15, 2010. We’re talking today to Kelly Kreiser, who’s a graduate of Thunderbird, from the Class of 2004. Kelly’s the executive director of Thunderbird for Good, and we want to talk with her a little bit about the background and the functions of that operation here at Thunderbird. So Kelly, can we start by having you tell us, what is the concept behind Thunderbird for Good, and how did it get started?
KREISER: Actually probably the easiest way to describe Thunderbird for Good is to start with how it got started, and it got started in 2004. The beginning, actually the godmother of Thunderbird for Good is Ambassador Barbara Barrett [phonetic]. Barbara Barrett was on our Board of Trustees at Thunderbird. She’s also a member of an organization called the U.S. Afghan Women’s Council. And that’s a public-private partnership with a lot of individuals, mostly women, who are interested in helping Afghan women succeed. Barbara had been in Afghanistan in 2004, and had asked a lot of Afghan women, “How can Thunderbird help you?” And she heard again and again, “We need business training.” And she, absolutely thinking about her connection to Thunderbird, said, “I know a place where we can get you that business training.”
She came back to the School with this idea of creating some sort of a program to help Afghan businesswomen entrepreneurs get the skills they needed to be successful. One gentleman here actually took up the call, Professor Steve Stralser, who’s a professor of entrepreneurship at Thunderbird, decided to get involved in this, and he volunteered his time. Actually, the program was created in very short order. They raised the funds for it, they created the curriculum, they put it all together, recruited faculty, recruited alumni, recruited students, got people in the community involved, and by January 2005, the first program was put on. And this was our Project Artemis program.
Now, at the time, I actually was a student at Thunderbird. I had graduated in December of 2004, and Steve Stralser was a professor of mine, and he was looking for students to help him during the time the women were on campus. I volunteered my time and participated in January as a volunteer. So I helped with some of the mentoring and gophering of the project, and got to know a lot of the women.
There were fifteen women who came on campus from Afghanistan, and they were phenomenal. They were absolutely fabulous. They came in for two weeks, and they participated in classes. Thunderbird faculty would help train them on the basics of business: marketing, management, finance, negotiations, leadership, networking. And then they would be able to go out into the community, into the Phoenix community, and go visit different entrepreneurs, women leaders, get to talk to people, and learn about different businesses that were of interest to them, and also in their industry. There were businesses like the Azteca Wedding Plaza, Cookies From Home, Del-Star [phonetic], Pam Del Duca from Del-Star. And we’ve had many, many, many other wonderful folks within the Phoenix community that have volunteered to speak to these women over time.
The women also were given tools to succeed. They were given laptop computers and training on how to use them. They were connected with women who would be their mentors for two years after they returned home. And during their time here, they created business plans.
So this two-week period of time was an amazing period of time for Thunderbird. I think we got involved with this because it felt right, but we didn’t really think through exactly what the ramifications were. And after the program was done, we realized what a profound impact this program had not only on the women, but also on us here at Thunderbird. And our entire community was so excited to be able to help these women during a very difficult time in the history of the country, that that started the discussions around, “Well, what do we do next?”
Now, Dr. Ángel Cabrera, the president of Thunderbird, recognized that this was a pretty special program, and it was something that was very well suited for what Thunderbird is all about. And he had this idea in his mind that we should be doing more of these sorts of things, and continuing with the work we were doing in Afghanistan. And he came up with this idea of Thunderbird for Good. So he came to me and he said, “Kelly, would you be willing to be the director of Thunderbird for Good?” And I thought, “Well, sounds interesting. What’s Thunderbird for Good?” His response was, “That’s your first job, figure it out. What’s Thunderbird for Good? But,” he said, “I can give you a couple pieces of direction, a couple of pieces of information that would help you figure out what Thunderbird for Good is. First of all, obviously your job is to do good. Find ways to do good work in the world. And find ways to do good work under the Thunderbird name. The second piece of information is find ways to get Thunderbirds involved, or faculty, or staff, or students, or alumni, our corporate partners, our community partners, all our constituents. Help them get involved in doing good. Help them build those muscles.” And the third thing he said was, “We are global business educators. That is what we’re good at, that’s our core. So stick with global business education. Don’t build bridges, don’t do hospital drives, don’t do food drives, don’t do marathons. All of those things are very good things, but they’re not what we’re good at. So be able to say no to the things that aren’t global business education, and really find ways to trade on what our strengths are.” I said, “Okay, that’s great. I got it: do good, get people involved, global business education. What’s the fourth thing?” He said, “Well, the fourth thing is, you don’t have any money. We will fund your salary, but there’s no money for this, so you need to figure out how to fund it or how to do without. We’re a nonprofit ourselves, so figure it out.”
And that fourth component actually has really been what has guided this, because if you think about what do you have of value when you don’t have money, and you start really digging, you realize, for a place like Thunderbird, we have quite a lot. We have all of our knowledge capital, we’ve got all of our great curriculum, all of the wonderful brains of our faculty. We have all of the energy and the experiences and the networks of our students and our alumni. I mean, all the passion of our staff. We’ve got our physical infrastructure here; our global networks. All of those things are incredibly valuable, and when you start going out and talking to people who do good in the world, and you say, “Well, I don’t have money, but I have all of these things,” they go nuts! They’re so excited, because those are the things that they would be buying. So for me it was very much of an eye-opener that we could do really substantial good work in the world by trading on these items.
HAMMOND: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the projects that Thunderbird for Good has undertaken?
KREISER: Absolutely. I talk about Thunderbird for Good projects in terms of two kinds of “buckets.” And the one bucket is the bucket of projects that are big, funded projects. They’re strategic in nature, they take long periods of time to accomplish. We’re very mindful about what we do with this bucket of projects. I’ll talk a little bit more about what those are, but basically Project Artemis is an example of one of these big projects in this bucket.
The other bucket is this very opportunistic bucket. It’s the bucket that we don’t plan these things, they just kind of come up to our doorstep and happen. And those things in that bucket, they tend not to have a big budget, or maybe any budget at all, and they tend to come to us from our constituent groups. Somebody shows up at my door and says, “I’m interested in helping people that I met on my Winterim in South Africa. I want to be a mentor to students in South Africa. Can you help me figure out how to do that?” Or we had a really great example recently: two of our professors, Bill Youngdahl and Bob Moran, do a great deal of corporate learning work with our partner Novartis. And Novartis, they do a lot of their corporate social responsibility in Africa with juvenile HIV, and they work with an organization called REPSSI [Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative]. They came to Bill and Bob and said, “You know, we really love the management training that you do for our Novartis employees. And if those REPSSI employees could have that same level of management training, boy, they’d be so much more efficient at their job, and they’d be able to help so many more kids with HIV in Africa.” And they said, “Bill and Bob, would you consider going to South Africa and doing some training? Would you volunteer your time?” And they said, “Absolutely!” So Bill and Bob volunteered their time. Novartis paid their way to go down to South Africa. They went down and did all of this training. And that way they were able to make an impact. It didn’t cost us anything. Bill and Bob donated their time, and we were able to do great work, and it was all this sort of very opportunistic stuff.
We had a group of students one time who—there was an earthquake in China a few years ago—they took it upon themselves to go out to our alumni in China and gather donations, and they came back and said, “We want to rebuild an elementary school,” in one of the provinces that was particularly hard hit. So again, we at Thunderbird for Good were able to kind of help guide them to some different aid organizations that we knew that we could work with. We connected them with other folks within our alumni base, other professors. But the students did all the work. So again, this really neat group of opportunistic projects that we can say yes to, because we’re a very fleet-of-foot organization.
But the big heart of the project is really those big projects, those big, planned projects. And I can tell you more about what those are. So as I said, Project Artemis is kind of the start of all this. And it started us on a path of working with women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Started working with these Afghan women, and we bring them to campus. In 2010 we’re bringing the fourth group of women for Project Artemis onto campus, so that will put our numbers somewhere around sixty Afghan women that we will have brought to campus over the past few years. But as wonderful as that is, and as much of an impact as we’re making with those sixty women, it’s still only sixty women. And we recognized a few years ago that if we wanted to make a big impact, or a bigger impact, we would need to work inside Afghanistan. And we knew that we would never have a … well, I shouldn’t say never, but we knew it would not be happening anytime soon, that we would have a Thunderbird Afghanistan campus. So that meant we needed to have strong partners. So we determined that while there was a lot of really wonderful work happening with our nonprofit partners in Afghanistan—people like Mercy Corps [phonetic], and certainly all the work that USAID is doing there—when the money runs out for relief work and grant work, those organizations will eventually work themselves out of a job, they’ll leave. Unfortunately, that means if we’ve developed capacity in those organizations, that capacity also leaves. So we decided that we would partner with an organization that was Afghan, so we partnered with a school, and we partnered with the American University of Afghanistan, knowing that the work that we do and the capacity that we build, people will be trained, the programs we create, the curriculum we create, would stay in Afghanistan, and it would be a legacy. So we created this relationship with the American University of Afghanistan. And they were very interested, because they had an interest in getting access to all of what Thunderbird does—and our great people and our wonderful curriculum and our students and our connections—all of those great things.
So then it, of course, comes back to that Point Number 4, where do you get the money? Well, it just so happened that we went and spoke with this wonderful woman, Deena Powell [phonetic], and she worked at the state department in the visitor’s program. And we talked to her about what we were doing in Afghanistan, and how we wanted to partner with the American University, and could the state department perhaps help us out with some funding? And Deena said, “This is a phenomenal program. I love it. What you’re doing is great. I’m leaving the state department in three weeks, but I’m going to work with an organization, Goldman Sachs,” one of the leading investment bankers of the world. “So,” she said, “come see me.” So we did. We went back to Goldman Sachs after she had gotten established, and it turns out she had been hired by Goldman Sachs to create a program under their corporate engagement office, to train women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Absolute kismet. So she actually really liked the model of a school in the developed world working with a school in the developing world, and they took that model and used it as part of the core of what has now become the Goldman Sachs Ten Thousand Women Program. And in that program, Goldman Sachs provides grants to create scholarships for women entrepreneurs to get business training, all around the world. And they give the grants to business schools in developing countries, and U.S. and Europe mostly, and then ask those business schools to create relationships with schools in the developing world: throughout Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia. And then they’ve created a community where all of these schools work together to share best practices, to share curriculum, to help each other with greater reach. The goal is, that in the next five years, as a team, as a group, all of our schools will have trained 10,000 women in business in developing countries.
So our program in Afghanistan was funded, and we now have programs that we run where the women go through, I think it’s about sixty hours of training, classroom training, over in Afghanistan. And it’s, again, all based around building your business, building a business plan, or a management plan. And those women, they come through in classes, and they are now part of an alumni group. And one of the things that we did with this program is we created a group where when you graduate from the Ten Thousand Women Program in Afghanistan, you’re part of this alumni group, and you’re asked to come back. Every quarter there’s networking events, so that they’re continuing to grow their community.
So between Project Artemis and the Goldman Sachs Ten Thousand Women Program, we started creating a really nice expertise in developing women in developing countries, educating them. So from there we moved on to Jordan. We said, “All right, well, we kind of understand working in the Middle East, and the peculiarities of working with Muslim businesswomen. Where else can we take that and expand?” So we had a great relationship with the Business Development Center of Jordan, and they said, “Wow, what you’re doing with Afghan women, we’d love to do with Jordanian women.” So we worked with them to create a series of programs where not only did we send our Thunderbird faculty to Jordan to train businesswomen and men in Jordan, we also brought Jordanian businesswomen here to Thunderbird for a program that is very similar to Project Artemis, called the Seeds Program. And that was done this past year in 2009. But we also did some other really neat things. We sent Thunderbird students into Jordan to be business consultants for Jordanian businesses. We also brought young Jordanian undergraduate graduates to Thunderbird to study alongside of our Thunderbirds for certificates in global entrepreneurship, to give them a taste of our network and our training. And then they went back and those students went back to work for those businesses that the Thunderbird students had done training for. So it was a very virtuous cycle of “How can we help build business in Jordan?”
So from there, we looked at this and we said, “Well, it’s really powerful to be able to have Thunderbird students utilize their business skills and their degrees to go help actual businesses.” And Thunderbird has been doing this for many years, through programs like Business Intelligence and Branch Management, and Leading Organizational Change. There’s a lot of programs where we’ve done real-world projects, but this was a really unusual opportunity for students to actually go into those emerging markets and do the work.
So that led a group of people at Thunderbird, including our registrar, James Scott, and myself, and Dr. Cabrera, of course, to think about how could we create experiential learning opportunities, and actually have this learning by doing, where students would get credits, and then they would also be doing good, and real good value for people. So we brought in at that point in time a professor, Professor Mike Finney. And Mike just basically took the ball and ran with it, and he came up with this idea of the Thunderbird Emerging Markets Laboratory. And in that program, students will go into different emerging markets, and they’re going to be doing work in these developing economies—doing good, but also learning.
And the last program that I’ll talk about here is our most recent program, which is a partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank, and a microfinance organization that is widely thought to be one of the top, if not the top, in Latin America, called Nibanco [Unibanco? (Tr.)]. And Nibanco is based in Peru. So again, going back to our expertise in educating women entrepreneurs, and understanding how to bring value to them, we also recognize that once women get the education, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be successful. One of the things that they have to have is access to capital. They’ve got to have money to start these businesses. So we started thinking about, “Okay, so how can we crack that nut?” We thought, “Well, maybe one of the ways we could do it is by partnering with the people that are already giving the loans to these women, and saying, ‘You give the loans, we can provide the education. Together, the women get what they need to be successful.’” So we recently got funding through the Inter-America Development Bank. Also involved in this is the government of Australia is providing substantial money in this, randomly, and that came through a Thunderbird connection—or an alum—Carlos Noyhouse [phonetic]. He is Peruvian. He was very excited about the idea that Thunderbird would be helping women in his native country. He started going out through his network, and amazingly, he was surfing buddies with the Australian ambassador to Peru. And over a conversation in the waves one morning, where he was talking about this great project, that’s how that connection was made. And that has enabled the government of Australia to come in and help with this amazing project. So between Nibanco; Thunderbird; the Inter-American Development Bank; the government of Peru; and our partner organization, the University del Pacifico, which is a business school in Peru; all of us have banded together to create this program where we’re not only…. Oh, and Goldman Sachs is involved—I shouldn’t forget them. Not only are we creating a Goldman Sachs Ten Thousand Women Program in Peru, where we’ll be providing business education for small and medium women entrepreneurs, but we’re also doing something really different, which is we’re going out and we’re going to train micro entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs. And these are women that have very small subsistence businesses. And over the next four years, we are going to educate 100,000 women micro entrepreneurs in Peru.
So these are kind of the things that we’ve been doing so far, that give you an idea of these large strategic programs.
HAMMOND: Okay. I am wondering if you can tell us a little bit about yourself, and what you did before you came to Thunderbird, and perhaps a little bit about how your Thunderbird background prepared you for this position.
KREISER: Absolutely. Well, my background actually is all business. I didn’t have any development background. I had an international background. Before I came to Thunderbird, I was working for a division of S. C. Johnson Company called Johnson Diversity. I was in the commercial cleaning products business, of all things. I loved it, it was fabulous. And my responsibility was mostly Europe and Asia, traveled quite a bit and did product development marketing for them. Absolutely adored it. There came a time when S. C. Johnson decided—I was in Boston at the time—they decided to close down the Boston plant, and the opportunities would be to move to Racine, Wisconsin, and my work would probably be more domestic in nature going forward. And I have to say, I really didn’t want to move to Racine, Wisconsin, and I had the international bug at that point in time. So I decided to part ways with the company, and that pretty much gave me an opportunity to think about what’s next. I knew I loved this international business work, and I had worked, actually, at my company, with several Thunderbirds. They were always the ones that were really regarded as the pros, and I would always ask, “Why are they the pros? Why are they so respected?” And it always came back to, “Well, they’re Thunderbirds.” And I thought, I need to find out more about this Thunderbird.
So I did a little exploration, had an opportunity to meet a number of alumni that convinced me that this was right for me. And in the summer of 2003, I came to Thunderbird to get my MBA. My feeling was that I wanted to own my own business, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, which is again why I had taken Steve Stralser’s entrepreneurship class. Through the coursework here at Thunderbird, you get exposure to not only the for-profit world, but the non-for-profit world, the development world. And even though I hadn’t pursued a strong development background, I learned a lot about it, just by going to the pub with my friends and listening to their experiences in the Peace Corp and in USAID. Again, this opportunity to volunteer with working with these women in Afghanistan, I never thought I would be doing this work. But what’s been interesting is I think that the business background that I have, and my experience with Thunderbird has served me very well, because the work that we’re doing with Thunderbird for Good is kind of atypical development work. It doesn’t follow a lot of the norms that some of our nonprofit friends are doing. It’s very unique, because we are really trading on our business expertise. And we go to our nonprofit friends to help us with the other aspects of these programs. But we’re leveraging our business expertise to do good work in the world. So my background with learning all about marketing and management and finance and negotiations and entrepreneurship have served very well for this role, because that’s really what we’re doing, is we are leveraging business expertise to create peace and prosperity in the world.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
Thunderbird School of Global Management - Historical Collections
