Carlson Consulting Enterprise Students Address Opioid Crisis

With more than 10,000 emergency room or hospital visits involving opioids and 373 lives lost to opioid-related overdoses in 2023, Hennepin County residents have undoubtedly suffered from the national opioid crisis.

In a multifaceted effort to combat this problem, the county government has partnered with the Carlson Consulting Enterprise (CCE).

This past school year, CCE students have consulted for community organizations that receive opioid response funding from Hennepin County. The goal is to ensure that this funding is being maximized to its greatest potential, helping to reduce and prevent opioid overdoses as much as possible.

“If there is a good example of non-traditional business school work that’s being done in the community, this is probably it,” says Hennepin County Director of System Design Lolita Ulloa, who leads the county’s opioid response efforts. “The opioid crisis overlaps in so many different areas of government and social services. Even though the problem is opioids, it impacts housing, food insecurity, workforce development, and youth. When the Carlson School students come in, they’re evaluating all of those pieces and how they’re connected and recommending areas that can be shored up.”

Embedded in Harm Reduction

The partnership began in Fall 2024, when teams of CCE students were paired with two nonprofits: the Aliveness Project, and Community Access for New Immigrants and African Refugees. Both receive some opioid response funding from Hennepin County.

As with other consulting projects that involve real-world clients, the CCE students tailored their work and recommendations to the specific needs of each organization. For the Aliveness Project, opioid response efforts are primarily centered on its harm reduction van. This van parks at strategic locations so workers can hand out Narcan (an opioid overdose reversal drug), first aid supplies, information about treatment programs, and other harm reduction resources to community members in need.

MBA student Emily Oates, who led the team that consulted for Aliveness, spent time in the harm reduction van to learn about that form of outreach firsthand.

“It was really impactful,” Oates says. “People who don’t understand harm reduction may have the perception that it’s helping people do drugs. But it’s actually helping people be safe and making sure people are well. You’re reducing overdoses, and you’re creating a structure for linkage to care. It was hugely important for my own personal development and growth to learn about this.”

For their analysis, Oates and her team focused on growth strategy, mission alignment, financial sustainability, and community perception. Some of their work included evaluating employee salaries, grant sourcing strategies, and communication plans for educating the public about the harm reduction van.

“They were able to evaluate and make suggestions,” says Jay Orne, research scientist and prevention/harm reduction manager at the Aliveness Project. “They helped map some of our data in order to show our funders that we are successfully meeting our deliverables, which helps us to show that we’re doing a good job and continue to hopefully get funding to do this great work.”

Orne appreciated that the CCE students made the effort to visit the harm reduction van in person, to truly understand the Aliveness Project’s work and clientele.

“I think everybody needs to engage with the opioid crisis,” he says. “We’ve lost millions of people, not just to overdose deaths but also to the isolation and loneliness of substance use disorder. It’s important for everybody, especially students who are going to be well-placed to be advocates in the business world, to engage with these important social issues. Then maybe they’ll be able to do something about it, with their time or money or expertise, down the road.”

Providing a Business Lens

With the success of Fall 2024, CCE’s partnership with Hennepin County continued into the spring semester. This time around, students are working with three more organizations: the Indigenous Peoples Task Force, African American Survivor Services (AASS), and the Alliance Wellness Center (AWC).

Gayathry Pradeep, an MBA student, leads the team that is consulting for both AASS and AWC. Her team meets with both clients weekly in order to learn about their work and provide recommendations.

“AWC is more focused on inpatient, outpatient, mental health, and residential treatments, and AASS is more focused on assessments, harm reduction, and community education,” Pradeep says.

Working with these two different clients has exposed Pradeep to a wide scope of opioid response. “This project gave me the opportunity to look at the opioid crisis through that business consulting lens and try to help by using all the things that we have learned in class,” she says.

With both clients, Pradeep’s team is focused on examining organizational readiness, evaluating everything from staffing to operations to financial management. The work has been challenging because both nonprofits are minimally resourced, she says, but that has made the project even more rewarding.

“The clients are really passionate,” Pradeep says. “It is very visible that they really care about the community and want to help, but these organizations might not be most effectively built because they’re not coming from a business background. The clients are the ones who know more about this issue and want to help, and we just bring in the business knowledge to help make sure that they can do their work more effectively.”

Learning with Impact

CCE Managing Director Siddharth Chandramouli says he hopes the partnership with Hennepin County will continue for as long as there is a need, so that his students can continue to serve the community while gaining important hands-on learning experience.

“I think Carlson School students in many ways are uniquely wired. They truly have a social conscience, and they truly feel that need to serve the community.” Chandramouli says. “These projects help the students understand that business principles can be applied in the community to make things run more efficiently, maximizing and optimizing limited resources, aligning people toward the same goal and mission.”

CCE is primarily an opportunity for MBA students, but each year a small number of undergraduate students are selected to participate, too. Divided into teams and guided by faculty who have consulting and industry experience with leading companies, the students consult for a variety of clients, from corporate to nonprofit.

“One of the reasons I decided to come to Carlson was the experiential learning,” Pradeep says. “Actually working with clients is a lot different than classroom simulation. It just gives us more exposure and context. It’s been really great to expand our network and learn more, too.”

Ulloa, from Hennepin County, reiterated that the partnership has been mutually beneficial, both as a learning experience for the CCE students and as an impactful service for the organizations that receive opioid response funding from the county.

“I see the Carlson School students who are going out into the community in a whole bunch of different ways as allies to this work,” she says. “They’re getting an inside view of all the different factors that need to be considered when we’re dealing with the opioid crisis. I am confident that the students involved have developed a better understanding of what public service work is, and they can take that beyond what they’re doing right now and into the future.”