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Non-Profit Success: National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE) Pursues Graduating 10,000 Members by 2025
How the Microsoft Nonprofit Tech Acceleration for Black & African American Communities Program (NTA) and HSO are helping a national non-profit meet its goal
About
The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) is one of the largest student-governed organizations based in the United States. NSBE, founded in 1975, supports and promotes the aspirations of collegiate and pre-collegiate students and technical professionals in engineering and technology.
With more than 600 chapters and more than 24,000 active members in the U.S. and abroad, NSBE’s mission is “to increase the number of culturally responsible black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community."
Challenge
For 45 years, NSBE has been a mainstay in the black engineering community, surviving and thriving through the most difficult of times—and 2020 was no exception. From the COVID-19 pandemic that spurred financial uncertainties to social unrest and racism, NSBE was continually challenged but did not falter. In fact, the organization increased capacity and improved operations, supporting its members with funds to assist NSBE students in transitioning from campus to home, including purchasing equipment, so it could continue learning online.
NSBE was able to quickly transition programs and initiatives to a digital format, including its first-ever Virtual Career Fair, virtual National Leadership Conference, and 46th Annual Convention. NSBE’s first-ever virtual Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK) hosted more than 1,300 3rd through 5th graders from three countries.
NSBE is also serving as a broker of best practices and resources for diversity, equity, and inclusion; its role in sharing strategies for equity, social justice, and innovation is growing exponentially…but all these challenges and changes have not deterred NSBE from pursuing its goal: Graduate 10,000 black engineers by 2025.
Since the goal was initially announced in 2015, more than 2,000 additional black engineers are earning bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. each year, bringing the annual total to 5,600+– more than halfway to the goal.
While this success is impressive, there are still 5,000 more to go, and NSBE is looking at both technical and adaptive challenges for ways to look past crisis and to focus on opportunity. This is where Microsoft came into the picture.
Solution
In 2020, Microsoft renewed its commitment to fighting racial injustice by utilizing its technology and partnerships to provide services and support at a local level to minority-focused nonprofits to drive change. One initiative is the Nonprofit Tech Acceleration (NTA) for Black and African American Communities program.
The NTA program increases technology support for nonprofits that support people of color, offering a range of services, from technology upgrades and full digital transformations to consulting and implementation support, based on need.
While there are opportunities around technology for membership association management and other areas, NSBE’s most pressing need was to update productivity tools, including installing computers donated by Dell. Getting these key systems, hardware, and processes in place would lay a strong foundation for future transformation using technology.
HSO is proud to be one of the support partners in the NTA program—having also worked with other organizations in the program, including BronxConnect, which offers alternative-justice, cure violence, and re-entry programs, and Camelback Ventures, an accelerator that develops and promotes early stage, underrepresented entrepreneurs to increase individual and community education as well as generational wealth—and was the natural choice for the NSBE project.
HSO and NSBE are currently working together to address productivity with a migration to Microsoft (Office) 365 and will be exploring other ways technology can support the organization and its goals.
Results
Through the NTA program, NSBE will no longer be constrained by finances and technical expertise. Through NTA, NSBE now has the funds for these important projects and a partner it can trust to bring them to life.
Improved communications and collaboration across the organization will better equip NSBE to meet its goal by 2025, and additional NTA funds are making it possible for the organization to not only upgrade its productivity tools, but also to explore other possibilities for improving operations through streamlined and automated processes so it can meet the 2025 goal and continue setting and meeting goals in the future.