Syllabus: Community Collaboration

Spring 2025
By Nithya Ramcharan ’25
Photos by Anthony Rathbun

BUSI 364/GLHT 364/SOSC 364
Innovation for Social Impact

DEPARTMENT
Rice Business

DESCRIPTION
This course teaches business skills, innovative approaches and field techniques with the goal of social impact. Students in groups collaborate with local organizations addressing food insecurity to assess their operations and develop solutions.

Doug Schuler believes in keeping students engaged with every aspect of his course, Business 364: Innovation for Social Impact. “I know everybody’s name, and I’m not afraid to ask some questions, so it’s not a course for people to hide,” he says. “But I think, generally, they don’t want to.”

Students in the class don’t shy away from tackling the commitments involved in working with organizations that focus on social services. Lectures, case studies and field projects partnering with community nonprofits in Houston instruct students in concepts including accountability, stakeholder theory and partnership assessment. Students are divided into small teams to work on off-campus projects.
 

“Most of the things that we do in class are not directly tied to our projects,” says first-year student Olutobi Adeyeri. “It’s more about learning concepts that help you understand an organization and its needs, especially in relation to other organizations that they partner with.” 

Adeyeri and her team — Nolan Connolly, Ashley Suazo Reyes and Amy Wang — are one of two groups in the class working with Alabama Gardens, a community garden founded 40 years ago in Houston’s Third Ward. The teams’ goals are to address challenges regarding garden maintenance, to build new, mutually beneficial partnerships and expand community involvement. 

Terry Garner, the longtime community garden coordinator, encourages the students to get their hands in the dirt as well. “[Garner] brought us to one of the plots that hadn’t been visited for a while by its owner. In his old age, the owner couldn’t really come to the garden very often, so we weeded it so that it would be ready when he comes back,” Connolly says.
 

On a recent Saturday morning, students Pablo Rascon ’27, Evie Gates ’25 and Bryant Huang ’25 joined Schuler at the garden, where they visited with Garner and made quick work of weeding one of the more than 50 vegetable plots assigned to community members. 

Schuler, who's taught the course for  was particular about having students participate in hands-on projects rather than work on assignments such as reports evaluating organizations they aren’t connected with. 

“It’s given students a lot of perspective on the agency of people in the spaces because I think when we’re here at the university … we’re thinking about these ideas abstractly,” Schuler says about the communities the organizations serve.

Doug Schuler is professor of business and public policy at Rice Business.