Bank deposit account fee study

Description: Low income consumers tend not to be profitable for banks due to the low balances they have in their accounts, as a result many banks extract perhaps excessive fees related to deposit account services from these consumers, sometimes in a potentially predatory way. Many low income consumers live paycheck to paycheck and so a reduction in hours/wages as a result of the Covid 19 emergency would have likely pushed their deposit accounts to zero, or into overdraft. Many banks have responded to the Covid-19 emergency by stating publicly that they will waive fees related to overdrafts, however it seems as though the banks that service the lowest income consumers have made the least promises to waive fees. I plan to document in a systematic way the public responses by the largest 100 banks (maybe more time permitting) on commitment to waive deposit account fees, and make this response public to hold banks accountable. I will follow up with analysis of quarterly regulatory data as the year progresses and data becomes available to document if banks stuck to their publicly stated promises to waive fees.

Support Needed: I will need help compiling the public commitment of banks to waive certain fees, I will also need help with the presentation of the data so any data analytics expertise would be great.

Referrer: Emily Williams, HBS

# of people needed: Open

Case on the Economic Impact and Policies

Description: A case is being written on the the Coronavirus impact in the global economy and the policies being implemented by different countries.The media and financial research reports tend to focus on developed countries, but we want to include as many developing countries as possible to provide a complete picture that is useful for case discussions but also to researchers that need to do comparative studies of the types of policies and implementation dynamics.

Support Needed: We need help compiling and updating a database of policy actions by different countries along several dimensions: lockdowns, monetary, fiscal, and others. You can contribute simply by listing the policies in the country where you are from, or if you want to be more involved you can help us design and mantain the crowdsourcing effort.

Referrer: Alberto Cavallo

# of people needed: Open

Coaching Non-Profits on Zoom, particularly those in communities of need.

Description: Lawrence, Massachusetts is 45 minutes from the HBS campus and one of the most vulnerable communities in the country. Community leaders need help with Zoom ASAP to help their community organizing efforts.

Referrer: Jeff Bussgang, HBS

# of people needed: Open

Additional Notes: Need someone ASAP - starting Monday @ 2p (3/23/20)

Food for frontline healthcare workers in Boston

Description: Off Their Plate is a grassroots movement that began with a simple idea. We rally around the tireless frontline COVID healthcare workers by restoring work and livelihoods to our local frontline workforce. We can do more than stay home. Our work provides a conduit for the community to provide during a moment of crisis: provide nutritious meals to the hospital teams we depend on, provide jobs to those who have lost them. Together, we can help take one thing Off Their Plate.

Support Needed: General help for HBSer Natale Guo, who (last week!) kicked off a nonprofit initiative called Off Their Plate that supports restaurant worker wages that go towards making nutritious, gratitude meals for COVID frontline workers. We launched in Boston and have been serving every day this week to Brigham, Boston Medical Center, Beth Israel, Mass General, and now Carney Hospital. My hope is we can expand to the FQHC soon where healthcare workers may be most in need. We serve staff ranging from nursing to residents to environmental/sanitation crew to front desk. Would love to hear good/better ideas from the ROGME community and also your suggestions for what a local economy really needs..

Referrer: Matt Weinzierl

# of people needed: 5

Harlem Children's Zone response to the crisis

Description: Harlem Children's Zone is looking for help connecting local families to support being offered by public and philanthropic sources in response to COVID.

Support Needed: Work with HBS '16 alum Hayling Price. Hayling writes: "HCZ staff often find themselves serve as first responders, so I’m currently monitoring local/state/federal relief measures (e.g., accelerated unemployment benefits enrollment, eviction freezes, food assistance) so our program team can connect families with emergency aid. Going forward I could support scanning the landscape for opportunities, which are continuing to appear across the public and civic sectors here. I could also us support scanning the upcoming federal relief package for measures relevant to our constituency. Finally, I'm interested in thinking creatively about how we share information and connection our families with other tech-based solutions we’re not currently considering…"

Referrer: Matt Weinzierl

Hebrew Senior Life (HSL)

Description: HSL is the largest senior care community in New England, spread out over 8 campuses caring for 3000 seniors. The caregivers are essential workers and need to be screened each day before their shift begins.

Support Needed: We need a number of volunteers to get to each of the eight campus communities during various shift times and perform onsite screening for caregivers before they enter the facility. The sites are located in Brookline (3 sites), Roslindale, Revere, Dedham, Canton, Randolph. Specifically, temperature checks. Obviously you would need to be asymptomatic yourself..

Referrer: Jeff Bussgang

# of people needed: 10+

Help deploy digital health tools in response to COVID

Description: Providence Health could use help with training and rolling out a range of digital health initiatives targeted at COVID.

Support Needed: Help HBS alum Matt Cohlmia in his work at Providence Health. Matt writes: I work at the digital innovation team at Providence, one of the largest health systems in the US. We're based in the Seattle area, but we have 51 hospitals across 7 states. As you can imagine, we're running a large number of initiatives to combat COVID-19, from digital home monitoring programs to triage chatbots to public awareness and community organizing campaigns....I would imagine we need smart and organized PMs to help deploy these digital tools in our regions and help be a point person for rollout. Could mean running virtual training, driving toward adoption KPIs, creating communications materials, etc.

Referrer: Matt Weinzier

ProjectN95 - National Medical PPE Clearinghouse

Description: ProjectN95.com, a non-profit rapid response team coordinating with governments and manufacturers to understand hospital PPE needs and efficiently deploy large volumes of resources where they are most needed. It is the group supported by Andy Slavitt recently talked about on Twitter.

Support Needed: On the demand side, manage relationships with hospitals to verify orders and identify points of contact. On the supplier side, reach out to manurfacturers to verify availability, logistics and capacity. Looking for MBA, ex-consultants.

Referrer: Brian Mcsteen

# of people needed: 300+

Additional Notes: Looking for students who have interest working with healthcare systems and/or suppliers, are interested in getting involved in the COVID19 response in support of front-line health workers, and have 5+ hours of bandwidth/wk to contribute to this work.

Psychological consequences of remote work

Description: How is remote work affecting employee job satisfaction, productivity, etc?

Support Needed: We are interested in how loneliness is affecting employees worldwide and are looking for a partner company to help us study this.
We would like to find a company that did a pulse/ general workplace well-being survey early 2020 or late 2019. We would like to repeat this survey adding additional survey items in a few weeks. We are looking for differences in terms of job satisfaction, productivity, social connectedness, general feelings of well-being, etc… as a result of the move to remote work.

Referrer: Mike Norton and Nicole Abi-Esber

# of people needed: 1-2

Support COVID-19 Patient Home Monitoring Program

Description: Providence Health has created a novel digital patient home monitoring program for patients who are presumed positive COVID-19, but do not yet need to be hospitalized, in order to both conserve hospital resources and protect providers. This program gives patients a thermometer and pulse oximeter, and automates check-ins 3x daily, then escalates to a teleICU team as needed.

Support Needed: In a coordinated response to this crisis of unprecedented proportions, health care organizations overall have transformed rapidly to support the needs of the community. Many work streams have been put into place to streamline, expand and rapidly expand acute care capacity, we have also set up programs to help support patients at home. Using telehealth technology, simple tools like Pulse Oximeters and thermometers, utilizing patient engagement tools like twistle, we have started monitoring COVID positive and PUI’s at home. We are able to identify adverse trends and utilize a centralized team of RN’s and providers to respond and intervene to prevent adverse outcomes. Understanding the impact of this program in helping keep patients safely at home, appropriate healthcare utilization will be essential for expansion, scalability and understanding of disaster response in other locations and future situations. Interested candidates can help us improve our existing workflows, learn from patient feedback and help us deep dive on data to identify and quantify the benefit of this program on a larger scale.

Referrer: Matt Weinzierl

Working from home

Description: I study remote work and have several ongoing projects on how the Covid-19 crisis is affecting productivity for both experienced and first time reote workers.

Support Needed: I am collecting anecdotes and testimonials of individuals trying to deal with remote work arrangements and would love to get some help on this.

Referrer: Raj Choudhury, HBS

# of people needed: Open