Net Impact Hosts Deloitte Social Impact Case Competition

On November 14 and 15, Net Impact hosted its annual Social Impact Case Competition, a social impact- and strategy-based challenge sponsored by Deloitte. Thirteen teams competed to craft a suite of three recommendations on business, social impact, and human capital strategy for the Connecticut Green Bank, the client featured in a brand-new Yale SOM case. This year’s first-place winning team was my group, “Team 6”: Casey Ma, Henry Melzer, Nataliia Nevinchana, Nathaniel Pendleton, and Caroline Petro (yours truly), all from the Class of 2026.

The case competition made for a fast-paced and exhilarating evening. The event opened with a warm welcome from Deloitte representatives and Net Impact leadership over dinner in the Snyder Forum. They introduced the case and reviewed the criteria on which students’ recommendations would be judged. Student teams then had from 7:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. to read the case, develop recommendations for the client, and create a slide deck to present.

The judges reviewed the submissions and announced at 11:30 p.m. which teams would progress to the in-person finalist round the following morning. Finalists received feedback on their submissions from 11:45 p.m. to midnight and submitted any revisions by 8:30 a.m. the next day.

Team 6 joined forces in an unconventional way. The Social Impact Case Competition is open to all SOM first-years, who can register as individuals or in groups. While most students form groups in advance and sign up together, all five of us registered as individuals, knowing this meant that we would be randomly assigned to a team.

Our client for the evening was the Connecticut Green Bank (CGB), a quasi-governmental entity that uses public funds to attract private investment in clean energy projects. The case took us back to 2018, when the CGB underwent an emergency restructuring to establish a more financially sustainable future amidst the unexpected loss of much of their public funding for the year. Our challenge was to identify which programs the CGB should prioritize in order to meet their investment targets, to suggest a human capital strategy that would allow them to meet newly emerging operational needs, and to articulate how our suggested changes could be made without sacrificing the organization’s social and environmental mission.

Although we had not chosen each other in advance, I was delighted to discover upon meeting Team 6 that our skillsets, personalities, and professional backgrounds reflected a microcosm of Yale SOM’s rich diversity. We joined forces as a former teacher, former consultants, a former food banker, and a startup founder. Two of my teammates are dual-degree students: one pursuing public health, and another environmental management. I believe our blend of private, nonprofit, and public-sector experiences positioned us ideally to tackle the case from a rich range of perspectives.

After learning that we were one of three finalist teams, Team 6 benefited from the incredibly thoughtful feedback offered by the competition’s student hosts. We worked into the night and early the next morning to incorporate the feedback, then returned to SOM to deliver our final presentation to a panel of three Deloitte practitioners from a variety of practices and offices. The judges listened attentively to our presentation and asked nuanced questions about our proposed strategies. Once all three finalist teams had delivered their presentations, the judges conducted a final deliberation and announced the first-, second-, and third-place winners to the entire group. After the winners were announced, all competitors had the opportunity to join the practitioners from Deloitte at a luncheon in downtown New Haven.

The entire case competition experience, from collaborating with my team to tackle the case, to presenting our recommendations to the panel, to lunching with our hosts and learning about their professional journeys, felt like a perfect encapsulation of why I am grateful to have chosen SOM. The rich intellectual challenge; the commitment to blending excellent business strategy with meaningful social impact; the warm and amazingly accomplished community of alumni; and perhaps most salient on Team 6, the passion, curiosity, intellectual rigor, and kindness that characterize this student body were all on full display.