When the five Class of ’26 M.S. in Global Commerce students of McIntire’s Wahoos for Winneba team arrived in Ghana, the technology school they had come to help actually had only two functioning computers. Students Caroline Briggs, Emma DeMarco, Sammy Hamilton, Carlyn Mitchell, and JM Simms had partnered with the Charlottesville-Winneba Foundation, an NGO born from the sister-city relationship between the two communities, for a five-week field placement.
“We really want to make this a long-lasting impact,” DeMarco said as the team prepared to leave for Africa. “We want to go in, do what we need to do, and then have that impact sustain itself for however long it can.”
The team’s first initiative centered on upgrading Coast Bridge Academy’s scant tech. The students reached out to donors, raising more than $48,000 to convert a classroom into a dedicated information and communication technology lab, outfitting it with 23 computers and laptops and providing a curriculum to match. Coast Bridge Founder Bright Boglo says, “We didn’t just build a computer lab; we created a space for opportunity, possibility, and hope for generations of young learners.”
The student team next tackled visibility. The centuries-old Aboakyer Festival, which celebrates the Effutu people’s migration and draws thousands of visitors, remained nearly invisible to the wider world. To help turn a treasured tradition into recognized heritage and a source of tourism revenue, the student team built a strategic marketing foundation, including a website with fundraising channels and laptops for local stakeholders. Dave Norris, Charlottesville-Winneba Foundation Director and a former Charlottesville mayor who has traveled to Winneba more than two dozen times, frames their work as connecting two communities and building something lasting.
This initiative was of the students’ own choosing. That is, no one at UVA in the fall semester or at MSGC partner school ESMT in Berlin in the spring had assigned the team any of it.
Like every student group in McIntire’s relaunched MSGC program, Wahoos for Winneba had sourced their own Social Impact Project, choosing the place and defining the problem themselves. The students drew their own maps and discovered their own goals.
Ghana was only one destination. The other MSGC teams decided on projects that led them across five continents, each drawn by a connection or a cause that meant something to them personally. Destinations ranged from a family-run lighting factory in northern Spain to an isolated mountain village in East Bali, with other students working directly with organizations in Kenya, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico.
“It just worked out that way,” says Professor Peter Maillet, McIntire’s Executive Director for Global Strategy and Director of the Center for Global Commerce, when asked whether the worldwide spread was engineered. “They are totally responsible for sourcing their own projects.” The results were as varied as the backgrounds of the students in the international graduate program. Across the wider McIntire and ESMT Berlin partnership, blended teams of more than 100 students landed in roughly 18 countries.
A Capstone, Not an Add-On
The Social Impact Project, or SIP, is the capstone of the MSGC program. After a fall semester of Global Business Core coursework and Professional Skills Seminars at McIntire and a spring semester at ESMT Berlin, students become management consultants for organizations committed to social change. For five weeks each April, they embed with a partner organization somewhere in the world, define a real problem, and deliver outcomes the organization can use. They then present their results during SIP Days in Berlin before returning to Grounds to walk the Lawn at UVA’s Final Exercises.
Maillet is emphatic about what the project represents. “In many ways, the SIP is the culminating integrative experience of the curricular experience they’ve had,” he says. Students are applying those experiences and skills from the nine-month program in real time for people, attempting to improve various situations in regions around the world. Maillet’s own course Global Challenges frames the issues. The fall’s project management and consulting classes build the toolkit; a social entrepreneurship class in Europe amplifies it.
Professor Jim Burroughs, Director of the MSGC, believes the project more than lived up to its billing. “The Social Impact Project was an amazing experience and a very transformative one for students,” he says. “It was conceived of as the hallmark of the entire program and it delivered.” Burroughs and Maillet stayed close enough to the work to make sure students were on the right track without getting in the way. They held Zoom calls with each team midway through the field experience before seeing the final presentations in Berlin, providing “a beginning, middle, end view that was highly instructive,” Maillet says.
Proving a Small Company’s Sustainability
For the Bright Innovations student group of Sophia Manav, Woods McCormick, Chase Mullins, Livi Warren, and Jack Witmer, a family connection took them to Pamplona, Spain. The team worked with AM Lighting, a third-generation, family-run firm that designs energy-efficient LED systems for the buses, trams, and trains that millions of Europeans ride daily. The company operated sustainably in practice but lacked the data and systems to demonstrate it. “We knew that we were operating sustainably, but we couldn’t prove it,” explains María Álvarez Aguirre, who represents the third generation of the founding family. “Knowing you’re doing the right thing is not the same as having proof you’re doing so.”
None of the students arrived as lighting experts, but they were empowered to build an interlocking sustainability toolkit: an ESG calculator that turns environmental impact into hard numbers a client can see, a materials-recovery system that returns aluminum and manufacturing waste to use, a go-to-market strategy for green mobility, and concrete manufacturing improvements.
“No single piece works alone,” as the team framed it. The calculator proves the impact, materials recovery reduces it, and the market strategy sells it. The students called the result “a real strategy, not just a school project.”
Helping a Community Tell Its Own Story
Near Tianyar, in the mountains of East Bali, students Brianna Kenealy, Myiesha Rahman, Julia Swierczynska, and Brilanda Volaj worked with the East Bali Poverty Project (EBPP), an organization built on helping people help themselves through education, healthcare, regenerative agriculture, and economic development. Three decades ago, the village of Desa Ban had no clean water, roads, healthcare, or schools, and was unknown even to UNICEF and local officials. The transformation since has been enormous, but as EBPP Founder David Booth’s team explained, much of that progress still wasn’t reaching the donors who could help sustain it.
So the students focused on storytelling and reach. They interviewed more than 20 community members, built a social media strategy grounded in authentic narrative, produced short-form content, and redesigned key features of EBPP’s website. To make the work durable, they ran workshops in photography, project management, social media, and AI, and created a guide to streamline future grant proposals, aligning EBPP’s real impact with how today’s donors discover and engage with organizations.
For Kenealy, the work reframed how she understood opportunity itself. “I witnessed the importance of equal opportunity and providing support to those who are motivated to better themselves and their community,” she says. “Most people don’t realize the large impact of the things we take for granted.”
Global Commerce for the Common Good
Eight MSGC teams reached organizations—identified through family ties, alumni networks, and faculty introductions—as wide-ranging as marine conservation nonprofits, carbon management ventures, and education foundations, addressing UN Sustainable Development Goals from quality education to life below water. That range, Burroughs argues, is itself part of the lesson. Students “all walked away with an appreciation for how much of the world is just not the U.S. or Western Europe,” he says, and for how much impact their UVA business training lets them have.
While many of the teams struggled at first, Burroughs says that ambiguity and doubt was the point: “It’s the most instructive thing you can go through, because in life you’re going to have to figure that out.” What stuck was the sense that the work shouldn’t end. Students told him the experience was nothing short of life-changing, reinforced by their voiced intention to use their skills for creating an even longer-lasting impact.
For Burroughs, that is both the takeaway and the embodiment of McIntire’s ethos. The SIP, he says, is “a part of the DNA of what McIntire is all about: commerce for the common good.” A rousing success in the School’s first year of the project’s adoption into the program, it’s a glimpse of what becomes possible when students are trusted to choose where in the world to make a difference and given the tools to do it.
