JAIMIE FRANKLIN
News Assistant
While studying business and serving others may seem independent and unrelated at times, Regan Schaffer, associate professor of business, has developed a program allowing students to pursue both.
Schaffer said she had planned on becoming a teacher at an inner city high school and working for a nonprofit organization on the side. But she fell in love with Pepperdine while attending graduate school at the School of Education and Psychology.
Schaffer began working as an assistant in the undergraduate business division to help pay the costs of her schooling. During this time, she helped coordinate a United Way campaign at Pepperdine, recruiting business students to manage the program.
When she returned to Pepperdine to receive her doctorate, she began working on developing a nonprofit management minor in 2003.
At the time, Pepperdine offered a minor in Youth Human Service as part of the Natural Science division. There were no students enrolled in the program when she began developing the minor. But, in her first year of advising for the nonprofit minor, the response was immediate, she said, with 23 students enrolling.
“I was always someone who volunteered ever since I was a little kid,” she explained. “While I loved volunteering, I was really fascinated by how nonprofits were effectively managed.”
The nonprofit management minor has received attention in recent years from students looking to use their business skills to reach out to their communities.
The program prepares students to work in the nonprofit sector. Along with Jere Yates, professor of business, and Jeff Banks, visiting professor of humanities. Schaffer developed the Service Learning course that is now a staple in the Business major and nonprofit minor programs.
Students in the course serve as strategic planning advisors to nonprofit organizations facing problems. Many of their projects are actually implemented.
Schaffer sees this program as being instrumental in preparing students for real-world management.
“People have an unrealistic view of the nonprofit sector,” she said. “They see the altruistic side but don’t understand the demands of keeping it running.”
The course also serves as a link between the popular business program at Pepperdine and Pepperdine’s mission to live lives of ‘purpose, service and leadership.’
“We decided to develop the course because we thought that we had a traditional business program … that did not reference anything distinct about our Christian mission,” Yates said. “In addition to regular business policy courses we thought we should have a Service Leadership course where students got the opportunity to work with nonprofit clients on business strategies.”
Schaffer has worked with more than 200 organizations through the service leadership course alone, including the American Cancer Society, Heart of LA Youth and the Ventura County Community Foundation (VCCF).
Schaffer will work once again with VCCF this semester when her students attend a strategic planning institute focused on developing, managing and planning for nonprofit organizations.
Schaffer also recently received a grant to further develop the Nonprofit Professional Education program, which will allow five representatives from various nonprofit organizations to study management courses at Pepperdine for free in exchange for access to case studies and organizational and management information for students.
In March 2007, Pepperdine’s first Habitat for Humanity house was dedicated to a family in Ventura, over which Schaffer was the main advisor. She said that it had been her dream to have a Pepperdine Habitat house for quite some time before it was finally completed.
Students and faculty describe her as a mentor and one of the leading nonprofit scholars in the country.
“I look to her as a mentor in a way,” said Max Kelemen, who graduated in 2007 with a minor in nonprofit management. “She’s extremely busy and she has a hand in a lot of different things but still takes the time to give personal attention to students. I don’t know how she does it.”
Communication professor Dr. Steven Lemley said he admires Schaffer for her work as well.
“We have one the country’s leading scholars in the field,” Lemley said. “She not only has a heart for nonprofit work, but a mind for it as well.”
Schaffer said she feels blessed to be at Pepperdine and, although she does so much, she considers herself only a piece in the Pepperdine puzzle.
“I feel that if a student graduates from Pepperdine and thinks that the knowledge they have gained is only to serve themselves then we have failed in our mission,” she said.
01-24-2008
