Emily Neelon |
What’s better than freshly baked cookies? Freshly baked cookies delivered to your door.
During a stressful week of surviving midterms, UP business students are supplying food for your stress-eating needs by serving up cookies to support a social cause.
Juniors Helen Harder and Emily Gould and senior Frank Phillips, all entrepreneurship majors, launched a cookie delivery service on Monday.
With a tentative schedule for delivery and plans to be open for business from 7-11 p.m. two to three nights a week, the three students will be baking and delivering the cookies themselves.
When the service is open, students can tweet, email, or Facebook message the team on their social media accounts and put in an order. The team will deliver the cookies to students wherever they are on campus or in the surrounding neighborhood within 30 minutes of receiving an order. The cost is $4 for two cookies and $5 for three.
The team will be donating all of their proceeds to Roosevelt High School’s Writing Center through the Rider VP program. The entrepreneurship majors chose to donate their profits to Roosevelt in the hopes of supporting an institution in the North Portland community where a majority of the students live under the poverty line.
“We’re focusing on trying to help other students (access) higher education because their writing center focuses on writing for scholarships and college entrance essays, among other things,” Harder said.
Gould, Harder and Philips began work on their cookie delivery service in January for their Social Entrepreneurship course, which aims to raise money for social causes. Taught by Professor Howard Feldman, this course examines problems through multiple lenses and gives students a different perspective than other business classes.
“This is all about the idea of creating social value, solving societal problems (and) utilizing business tools and techniques,” Feldman said.
The team’s first step towards launching their business was securing approval from the Office of Student Activities for baking and delivering cookies and receiving food handling permits from Multnomah County. During their first night open for business, they received and delivered 20 cookie orders.
“We’ve been planning since the very first week (of the semester),” Gould said. “We formed our group and then pretty quickly came up with the idea.”
The team is modeling their project off of the cookie delivery service at University of San Diego. Universities across the nation have begun offering cookie delivery services as a means of raising money for social causes.
Insomnia Cookies, a chain of bakeries that delivers cookies to college campuses and raises money for organizations combating hunger, has had widespread success in the social entrepreneurship field. Insomnia Cookies began at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and has spread across the country to New York, Boston, and Miami among other locations.
Gould, Harder and Phillips launched a Kickstarter, a website where individuals can donate money to an entrepreneurial venture, to cover the cost of the ingredients, packaging, and advertising for the cookies. The Kickstarter exceeded its $500 goal with a total of $545 raised.
The project is Gould, Harder and Phillips’ first opportunity to make their entrepreneurial aspirations into a reality. For Harder, who has a passion for baking, the cookie delivery service is an chance to combine her culinary and business interests.
“The future is super unknown, but I definitely want to go into baking,” Harder said. “This is a real test to see if you can make your ideas happen,” Harder said.
They plan to visit the Roosevelt Writing Center to see how their project is positively affecting students they hope to support.
“At some point we’d like to go over to Roosevelt and actually volunteer in the writing center,” Gould said.
Although the team has only planned to donate to the Writing Center thus far, they may expand their outreach if the service is successful.
“Anything we can get will make a difference for them,” Harder said.
Emily Neelon is Faith and Fellowship Editor for The Beacon. She can be reached at neelon17@up.edu or on Twitter @Neelonsays.
