By Aimee Levitt
Beth Torres
Beth Torres (EMBA’11) is a passionate advocate for nonprofits, not just in her own work as President and CEO of the Make-a-Wish Foundation of Middle Tennessee, but also as a member of the Nashville business community and the Vanderbilt Business Alumni Board, where she helped develop the Owen Board Fellows program to give Vanderbilt MBA students experience sitting on nonprofit boards.
Nonprofit work wasn’t always on her radar. Torres’s early jobs were in sports marketing, and she expected she would spend her entire career in corporate America. But then she worked at an organization that was poorly run and unsuccessful, which inspired what she calls a “karmic shift” and a search for something more meaningful. “I had to do something good in the world,” she says, “because my last job had been so miserable.”
Her first role in the nonprofit world was with Junior Achievement USA. She thought the work would be fun, fulfilling, and much easier than a corporate job. She was correct on the first 2 counts, but not the last: it was the hardest work she had ever done. And she loved it.
Initially, Torres believed that nonprofits were run by, as she put it, “really well-meaning people who don’t emphasize the business side, but the mission side.” Her boss at Junior Achievement USA showed her a very different reality—that a nonprofit could both do good in the world and run like a successful business. This revelation changed her perspective of nonprofit work and started her on a journey of advocacy.
Her advocacy grew stronger as a student in Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program. Torres was chosen as the 2009 recipient of the EMBA Nonprofit Management Scholarship, which provided the financial resources she needed to join the program. Of the 50 students in her class, she was the only one from the nonprofit world. She wanted to change the narrative for nonprofits and help others see the incredible work and potential of organizations that were giving back to the world in successful and sustainable ways.
The main difference between corporate vs. nonprofit, as she sees it, is that when people invest in a corporation, they expect to get their money back (and then some). When people invest in a nonprofit, they’re investing in their community. “You have to believe that we’re going to do what we’re supposed to do, every year,” she says.
Shortly after Torres graduated in 2011, she was invited to apply for the CEO role at Make-a-Wish. At first, she was uncertain. She saw herself as more of a second-in-command kind of leader. Plus, Make-a-Wish had just gone through several years of turmoil and organizational challenges. However, she saw the ways she could improve the organization based on what she had learned at Vanderbilt and believed it could be transformed with the right business mindset. And that’s exactly what happened. In the past 12 years, the Make-a-Wish Foundation of Middle Tennessee has doubled both the staff (to 12) and the number of wishes granted per year (155) and tripled the revenue to $3.2 million.
Over the years, Torres became more involved in alumni affairs at Vanderbilt and observed that many of her former classmates were invited to sit on nonprofit boards as business leaders, though many had little to no experience working for nonprofit organizations or exposure to nonprofit management courses. This gave Torres an idea: What if Vanderbilt MBA students could learn about the nonprofit world and develop their community leadership skills by serving in internships on boards?
This idea developed into what is now known as the Owen Board Fellows program. Torres worked alongside Mario Avila (MBA’12), the director of Vanderbilt’s Center for Social Ventures, and Kathleen Fuchs Hritz (EMBA’22) to flesh out the details of the program, which matches 30-35 students each year with nonprofit organizations. Students serve on these nonprofit boards and take on special projects to improve the effectiveness of the organizations. Projects vary based on each student’s interests and the needs of the nonprofit they are working for; last year, for example, the board fellow assigned to Make-a-Wish, Bryan Chang (MBA‘24), helped outline the investment policy and RFP notes for financial advisors.
Torres believes the beauty of a well-run nonprofit is that there’s room for it to find a gap in the community and fill it. “A nonprofit should be adjusting all the time,” she says. “That’s where business plays a role: how do you start up, when to merge, when to sunset, how to know when something has been realized and close it.”
The Owen Board Fellows program is now in its fifth year. Every year, there are more applicants than available slots. “The students that are applying are doers,” says Torres. “The fact that these students want this opportunity speaks to the direction business leadership is going. This generation is more well-rounded, more balanced, and more community and socially aware.”
The program also gives the students a chance to represent Vanderbilt in the larger Nashville community and support the Center for Social Ventures’s larger goal of fostering social entrepreneurship and supporting nonprofits. It also shows them that the gap between nonprofit and for-profit businesses is not as large as it may seem.
“This generation may change businesses to be more responsive to the community,” says Torres. “And the leadership of nonprofits will be more business-savvy without losing heart. On my best days, that’s who I am. I want that for us. I want that for our industry. I want that for our community.”