Students Go Virtual for HousingWorks Live Case Competition

The HousingWorks Live Case Competition represents an initiative within the School to expand experiential educational offerings for students, while at the same time doing some good for local organizations.

HousingWorks, Inc., located in the Fenway/Symphony neighborhood of Boston, “aims to reduce or eliminate barriers to subsidized, affordable and special needs housing” by connecting users, advocates, providers and governmental agencies through their data platform.”

Students were tasked with developing ideas for increased marketing efforts to each of their constituencies, combatting misinformation in the marketplace about the existence of HousingWorks data, and developing alternatives for generating revenue from their unique database of more than 20 years of history on the Massachusetts low-income housing market.

The competition began with a Case Analysis Training Session in late February with Assistant Professor of Management Kelly Basile and Lecturer in Business & Economics John Barrett, followed the distribution of the case to teams on March 6th. Despite the challenges presented by COVID-19, the case teams worked hard on their analyses throughout March and participated in a Live Q&A with key HousingWorks leaders on March 27th. The teams facilitated their presentations via Zoom for a panel of judges that included Associate Dean of Business & Management and Assistant Professor of Management Anne Marie Pasquale, Assistant Professor of Management Jing Yang and recent graduate Austin Spencer ’19, who began at HousingWorks as a marketing intern and served as their finance and operations manager after graduating.

Grace Kiritsy ’21 and Julia McAlpin’20 made up the winning team. Congratulations to all who participated!

TEAMS

Team 1:

• Nicole Lloshi
• Kay Murray
• Rachel Phelan
• Maggie Rosemond
• Hunter Winsor

Team 2:

• Grace Kiritsy
• Julia McAlpin

Team 3:

• Haley Dickinson
• Caroline Ferguson
• Olivia Parchesky
• Kerri-Anne Pendergast
• Katherine Winn