Monica Chi

Farber Intern at Youth Industry (2000) and REDF (2001

MBA, Harvard Business School, 2002
The Trium Group, Senior Consultant

What do Youth Industry, REDF, the FBI, and The Trium Group have in common? Perhaps not much at first glance, but these are all organizations where Monica Chi has worked to help others achieve their full potential.

Monica was first a Farber Intern in 2000 at Youth Industry, a nonprofit that trained and employed homeless youth in five social enterprises. That summer Monica was “exploring what the whole world was about — how you could apply business principles in the nonprofit sector.” Monica worked with the Recycled Merchandise business, which solicited donated goods for Youth Industry’s thrift stores. She created an operations plan to optimize their donations. Through her work with Youth Industry she learned about an entirely different side of San Francisco; she recalls that “it increased my level of compassion for people who are less fortunate and I really wanted to help them. Seeing how you can harness people’s potential and increase that no matter what state they’re in and...how great it was to be able to provide that.”

That fall Monica entered Harvard Business School, and she returned to the Farber Program the following summer, this time as an intern with REDF. “I really liked the way REDF is set up...that it has such a specific mission and specific strategy for carrying it out and is very effective.” Monica was particularly interested in the idea of the philanthropic sector driving significant change and thought, “If I was going to work anywhere and see things on the frontline, what better place than to go back to REDF to do that.” That summer Monica worked on a project for REDF analyzing various structural options for the organization, and she also worked on a business feasibility study for Toolworks, a nonprofit that served individuals with disabilities. Her second Farber Internship experience reaffirmed what she had learnt the previous summer and helped her recognize “the power of what we could do, as business people changing the world, or at least affecting it significantly. You could be creative with how you wound up using an MBA — there wasn’t just one track.”

As Monica considered her next step after business school, she found inspiration in her Farber experiences. “Places...do exist where you get really smart, ambitious, and caring people together who find an innovative way to make a huge difference in the world, and in REDF’s example in particular, a local community. I think that very much shaped my decision around looking at jobs coming out of business school.” Monica received a Harvard Business School Service Leadership Fellowship with the FBI, where she focused on leadership development and helped the agency’s leaders undertake a new strategic direction as the agency placed much greater emphasis on counter-terrorism. “I feel like that position was in the same spirit of the work that I had started doing at REDF which was all about using my business skills to make a difference in the world.”

After her Fellowship at the FBI ended, Monica joined the strategy consulting firm The Trium Group in San Francisco, where she continues to enjoy leadership development work as a Senior Consultant. “It’s really about helping people achieve their own leadership potential. I can see the difference that we have on people. We facilitate these dialogs, we have these offsites, we engage in these interventions with our clients, and they walk away with new insights, and new skills and abilities that not only help them in their professional life but I think also spill into their personal life as well. I would say that if there is one theme that’s run through from the beginning, it’s this idea of helping people achieve their own potential.”

Read profiles of four other Farber Alumni

• Samantha Levine, MBA, Kellogg School of Management, Manager, The Bridgepsan Group
• Caroline Pappajohn, MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Enterprise Director, New Door Ventures (then known as Golden Gate Community, Inc.)
• Amanda Pitre-Hayes, MBA, Haas School of Business, Manager (Environmental Programs & Grants), Vancity & Citizens Bank
• Tony Shen, MBA, Haas School of Business, Chief Operating Officer, Edtec

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