While most business majors spend years attending class after class to prepare them to become successful business leaders, the director of a local HIV/AIDS housing agency got a mountain of business education in just a few weeks.
Matt Teter, executive director of Calcutta House, was one of nine representatives of AIDS service organizations from throughout the country selected to participate in a management-development program at the University of California Los Angeles Anderson School of Management.
The UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Executive Program brought together a total of 40 directors of nonprofit healthcare agencies in Los Angeles at the end of July for a 10-day intensive training meant to hone their leadership skills and help them guide their organizations toward success.
“The best way to put it was that it was a few semesters of business school packed into a two-week period,” Teter said.
The participants indeed had a packed schedule, attending classroom instruction and working groups from about 7:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. each day. Each person was also tasked with developing a Community Health Improvement Project — a practical application of the classroom lessons for each participant’s respective organization.
For Teter’s CHIP, he worked on creating a plan to prepare Calcutta House to begin fee-for-service billing under Medicaid and Medicare for the services it delivers.
A representative of each participant’s organization was asked to attend the final two days of the training, and Joe Drennon, vice chair of the Calcutta House board, flew to California to help complete the CHIP.
Teter said the experience gave him a new perspective on his work with Calcutta House, which he said will help him to further fuel its growth and development.
“I think, generally speaking, it’s always a good idea for nonprofit leaders to take some time away and learn some new things,” he said. “It was a great learning environment and just the fact that we were at the Anderson School and had the best professors the school has to offer leading the classroom instruction was great. We were all nonprofit executives and sometimes we forget that we’re running a business, so it’s a good idea to receive as much education and learning and peer-to-peer counseling as possible because that can provide greater stability for your organizations.”
The program, which has graduated more than 550 executives since its inception in 2002, previously only accepted representatives of health agencies that received federal funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration, but that agency did not participate this year, which allowed the program to choose from a wider pool of candidates.
Anderson School senior program manager Diana Hernandez said this year also marked the first time AIDS service organizations were specifically sought. Fifteen heads of ASOs applied for the program, with nine eventually being selected.
Teter was nominated by the M•A•C AIDS Fund, a Calcutta House funder.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].