Business Students Provide Blueprint for Growth at Boys and Girls Club of Greater Lowell

The Boys and Girls Club of Greater Lowell will open its newly renovated teen center in January, a milestone that marks the beginning of an ambitious expansion of services for local youth.

And it will do so with a detailed roadmap drawn up by students from the Manning School of Business.

This fall, students in Associate Professor Scott Latham’s senior-level Strategic Management course developed more than 80 pages of research-backed proposals focused on two critical priorities for the club: increasing teen membership and strengthening workforce development opportunities.

Proposals ranged from esports tournaments and open mic nights to career fairs and commercial driver’s license (CDL) training, and included operational strategies and program models complete with timelines, budgets and measures of success.

Boys and Girls Club Executive Project Manager Mai Nguyen says the partnership gave the organization useful insight as well as highly welcomed extra support.

“Nonprofits are always short in terms of funding and time,” she says. “When we have deliverables like this, it gives us a roadmap. We’re not starting with a blank page.”

The semester-long project kicked off with a classroom visit from Boys and Girls Club staff, who shared the organization’s priorities for serving Lowell teens. A week later, the students visited the club for a guided tour of the new teen center and existing program areas. 

“Coming to the club and seeing the kids and the spaces and everything they’re building, it brought such a good feeling and drove us to push ourselves further,” says Brian Alexandre, a senior finance and marketing student from Acton.

Students then worked in small groups for several weeks on different components of the project, completing one phase and then passing their work to the next team. Alexandre says working on a project in which everyone depended on one another made the experience feel more like a professional consulting assignment.

“If one person missed their part, it could impact the whole document,” he says. 

Alex Kolchinaku, a senior marketing and management information systems student from Braintree, says it was “probably the most unique project I’ve ever done.”

“A lot of projects are just theoretical; with this, we could come up with ideas we thought were worthwhile, based on our different backgrounds and experiences, and give them something they might actually use,” he says.

After submitting their final proposals, the students returned to the club on the final day of class to discuss their work with Nguyen, Youth Development Director Shirley Pimentel and Pathways Manager Devonna Williams.

Alexis Sinuon, a senior marketing student from Tyngsborough, says the project underscored the value of experiential learning and community engagement.

“Seeing the impact the club has and knowing they might use our ideas made it very rewarding,” she says.