A team of 114 Berkeley MBA students and their significant others proved their prowess beyond the classroom as they took fourth place in a frenzy of activities at the Challenge for Charity (C4C) Weekend at Stanford from April 17 to April 18.
From baseball to bocce ball and basketball to bowling, with a few trivia contests and spelling bees thrown in to test mental agility, the competition involved eight California schools and the University of Washington. All of the schools are members of Challenge for Charity, a 25-year-old nonprofit organization that fosters volunteerism and fundraising at MBA programs to help create socially responsible business leaders.
Among the Haas star athletes were Kent Newman, MBA 10, who won the 5K run, and Niloufar Aazam-Zanganeh, MBA 10, winner of 11 Swiss national golf titles, who took first place in women's golf. The five members of the Haas School's ultimate Frisbee team also claimed first place.
The weekend culminated a yearlong volunteering and fundraising effort to benefit the Special Olympics and a local charity of each school's choice. The schools cumulatively raised $400,339 and volunteered 13,030 hours. For the third year in a row, UCLA was the overall winner, taking home the coveted Golden Briefcase. Haas came in eighth. The results were based on the number of hours volunteered, money raised, and performance during the weekend.
Haas students volunteered 937 hours on a variety of activities that included coaching Special Olympics and building bikes at the Alameda Point Collaborative, a community of formerly homeless people. They raised $16,000 through several events, the largest of which was a Halloween party.
"With every event that I helped organize, I became more passionate," says Anna Lee, MBA 10, the organizations' vice-president of sports weekend. "There are no other clubs at Haas like it. It creates a certain sense of community within the school."