Case Article—GAP: A Humanitarian Initiative of Ramakrishna Mission for Underprivileged Children

Abstract

Conventional textbook models of profit-maximizing firms are generally unsuitable for understanding and modeling the objectives of a nonprofit organization. Closing this gap is especially important as nonprofits, regarded as the third pillar of the society, are increasingly prevalent along with the government and the for-profit businesses. GAP, a humanitarian project undertaken by Ramakrishna Mission (RKM), a large nonprofit organization in India, has been highlighted in our case. Our case serves three pedagogical objectives: (i) understanding the cost structure that is specific to the GAP project, (ii) applying break-even analysis, and (iii) quantitative modeling of the nonprofit’s decision-making problem using a simple spreadsheet modeling approach. The case has been tested across a diverse set of courses across different MBA programs at two public business schools in India. In all those courses, students found the case challenging but were appreciative of the hands-on experience gained by working on a real-life decision-making problem.