Dean Kerwin Charles Announces Inaugural Winners of Dean’s Mission & Impact Award

In an email to the Yale SOM community today, Dean Kerwin K. Charles announced the winners of the 2021 Dean’s Mission & Impact Award. The newly created annual award recognizes students from the graduating class whose actions exemplify the school’s mission to educate leaders for business and society.

“Ours is a business school that, since the day of its founding, has been committed to and inspired by the belief that in their leadership roles, SOM graduates think not only about their organizations’ bottom lines but also about the impact of their decisions on the broader society,” Charles wrote. “In their professional lives, generations of SOM alumni have tackled difficult problems and conducted themselves in a fashion consistent with our animating mission. This award honors graduating students whose activities while pursuing their degrees have been similarly exemplary.”

The inaugural winners of the Dean’s Mission & Impact Award are:

• The graduating members of the MBA for Executives healthcare area of focus, who acquired thousands of masks and distributed them to homeless people in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The members of the healthcare cohort were also recognized for making heroic efforts on the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic while remaining engaged in their studies and the Yale SOM community. “As a group,” Charles wrote, “they excelled on many fronts under almost incomprehensible strain.” 
• The student leaders of the Social Impact Consulting Club, who led their colleagues in providing assistance and advice to local communities and organizations during the pandemic. “These students demonstrated that rigorous thinking paired with genuine concern can have positive impact,” Charles wrote. 
• Lina Kacyem ’21, an MBA student who has led efforts to fight racism as a leader in Student Government, the Black Business Alliance, and the Council on Anti-racism and Equity. Kacyem, Charles wrote, “has acted diligently and thoughtfully to ensure that we as a school live up to our values. She has been a moral compass for the school.”

In recognition of the award recipients, the school will make contributions to organizations of their choice that are doing work aligned with the Yale SOM mission. 

The recipients, Charles wrote, “exemplify a spirit noticeable throughout the student body—they combine sober-minded analysis and full-hearted enthusiasm while aggressively seeking to improve the communities they touch.”