Babson College
EN-9: Community Partnerships

Community partnerships through the Bernon Center include:

Friends of the Homeless of the South Shore​
Friends of the Homeless of the South Shore consist of a food pantry, a clothing closet, a furniture bank, and housing for homeless families. Volunteers assist with a variety of tasks from yard work to painting to construction.

The Greater Boston Food Bank
The Food Bank annually distributes nearly 20 million pounds of food, for a total wholesale value of over $41 million. The food is distributed to a network of more than 800 member feeding programs (including soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless shelters) throughout the nine counties in eastern Massachusetts. Volunteers work to sort incoming donations and package them for delivery.

Harvard Square Church Meals​
Harvard Square Churches Meal Program serves dinner every Thursday evening to over 120 homeless guests. Babson volunteers participate in preparing and serving meals as well as providing social contact for the guests.

Community Servings
Community Servings is Greater Boston's free, home-delivered meals program for people ill with AIDS, their dependents, and caregivers. Our goal is to serve all individuals with AIDS who request meals, as well as their needy caregivers and dependents. We are committed to serving a diverse client base and have worked hard to reach Greater Boston's traditionally disenfranchised and under-served populations.

Camp Sunshine
Volunteers help with food service, arts and crafts, recreational leadership, one on one assistance, child care and more. Students will volunteer for a week at a time and be living on site.

Natick Community Organic Farm
The Natick Community Organic Farm is a non-profit, certified organic farm providing productive open space, food to the public and hands-on education for all ages, year-round. The Farm is always looking for volunteers and is located locally on Rt. 16 in Natick.

Cradles to Crayons
Cradles to Crayons puts new and gently-used children's essentials into the hands of Massachusetts families who need them most. From strollers and car seats to books and clothing, we provide items that enrich the lives of children and the people who love them.

Rosie's Place
The mission of Rosie’s Place to provide a safe and nurturing environment for poor and homeless women to maintain their dignity, seek opportunity and find security in their lives.

Wellesley Housing Authority/Barton Road
Babson supports local low-income families living in public housing through a variety of programs. Some past programs have included holiday gift donations, tutoring and mentoring for children, family togetherness events, and computer classes. We are always in need of volunteers, especially men, willing to be mentors and/or program coordinators.

Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston​
The mission of Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston (BGCB) is to help boys and girls, generally from disadvantaged circumstances, develop the qualities needed to become responsible citizens and leaders. To achieve this, they offer a variety of program activities and support services designed to assist in the educational, emotional, physical and social development of 6-to-18 year olds, without regard to social, racial, ethnic, or religious background.

​​​​​​Needham Housing Authority
The Needham Housing Authority's mission is to provide decent, safe, affordable, housing for low to moderate income families and individuals and to offer programs and resources to improve the quality of life for residents, program participants, and the broader Needham community while respecting the rights and privacy of all. ​

Additionally, there is a Habitat for Humanity organization on campus that hold several alternative break trips to support the organization.

The Lewis Institute illuminates a path for students, faculty, and corporate partners seeking entry into the field of social innovation. We help create unexpected yet fruitful collaborations between those who see no distinction between social responsibility and profitability, leading to partnerships that result in business prosperity and societal improvement. Whether it’s the Social Innovation Lab—powered by Toyota—or Food Sol​, we’re always pursuing unique ways to change the status quo.

The Lewis Institute's work is ongoing, through several different programs. Founded with a gift from a donor, the Lewis Institute is now housed at Babson.

Programs at the Lewis Institute address:
-Sustainable and local food
-Support for local non-profits through the Babson Board Fellows program
-Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship

Women’s Entrepreneurial Development Lab
Partnering with the International NGO Made By Survivors (MBS), the team in Babson’s Social Innovation Lab has created a “prosperity model” designed to help raise the social and economic status of marginalized female populations. ​​The Babson-MBS Prosperity Model is built upon three unique principles:

-A commitment to the large investment required to support women who have been constrained by poverty, discrimination, and the violence of forced marriage, marriage, domestic abuse, or trafficking as they move from social and economic marginalization to holistic prosperity. For MBS, that investment takes the form of substantial, innovative, college-level education in programs in entrepreneurship and design thinking, ongoing training in job skills and human rights; and, perhaps most importantly, a commitment to wages that are well above the standard low-level wage paid for handicrafts and other small-scale production in a majority of shelter home and NGO models. Indeed, MBS is currently benchmarking wages paid at its Kolkata jewelry production centers at approximately the level of a recent college graduate in India.

-A commitment to a migratory business and production model that will enable survivor-artisans to retain and leverage the job training skills received during their after-care treatment as they move back home to restart their lives. Currently, economic development programs are clustered in the destination sites where trafficking survivors who have been rescued are receiving aftercare. These sites are mostly in large Indian cities-Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Pune-which means that when survivors are repatriated to their homes in rural areas of Indian states or in neighboring countries such as Bangladesh or Nepal, all that they have gained by being part of a program such as MBS' jewelry training program will be lost (including the high wages that have enabled them to begin enjoying a free, independent, independent, sustainable life). MBS' migratory business model solves this problem by attending to the conditions of poverty, lack of opportunity, and discrimination in source communities that contribute to the problem of trafficking in the first place.

-A commitment to helping to eliminate gender discrimination by providing a range of choices in livelihood, e​ach of which comprises dignified, creative, creative, sustainable, high value employment within the context of socio-cultural norms around gender, caste, and class. Economic development programs established by MBS are carefully constructed in order to respond and to push past such barriers. For instance, because metal-smiting has been a traditionally male-only profession in India, MBS is proud to say that we have the first cohort of trained female metal-smiths in India, thereby enabling our survivor-artisans to help demonstrate within their communities the power and reward of breaking down traditional gender-based constraints.​​