Booth Students Partner with Pickles Group to Map Chicagoland Family Cancer Prevalence

Guest Post by Abhi Jain (MBA ’22)

Each academic quarter, Booth Social Impact (BSI), a student-led club at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, partners with Chicagoland nonprofits to provide pro-bono strategic consulting to help organizations amplify their impact through student support. Between October and December 2021, Booth students Karthik Koneru (MBA ’23), Adelaide Curry (MBA ’23), Kayvon Soheili (MBA ’23), Chunbai He (MBA ’22), and me, Abhi Jain (MBA ’22) partnered with Pickles Group to help them identify opportunities to grow and support more families in 2022.. We were coached by Niyati Upadhyayula (MBA ’18).

Our group was especially excited for the opportunity to work with the Pickles Group as we each had close relatives or friends who were affected by cancer. We understood how cancer affects the whole family and were drawn to the Pickles Groups vision in providing free peer-to-peer support and resources to kids affected by a parent’s cancer.

After Pickles’ successful launch in the North Shore, the BSI team was consulted to develop a market entry strategy for Pickles’ expansion into under-resourced, cancer prevalent, and diverse communities in the greater Chicagoland area. Over 10 weeks, the BSI team conducted market analysis using various socio-economic and regulatory data points to identify potential neighborhoods for future partnership and engagement. The qualitative data was promising, but there was a need to further validate the analysis through primary research.

In phase 2 of the project, BSI team had “boots on the ground” speaking to various charter schools, religious groups, non-profits, and community health centers to better understand opportunities for authentic partnership in neighborhoods with a high cancer prevalence.

Through the synthesis of quantitate and qualitative data, we recommended that the North & South regions of Chicago for future Pickles partnership and growth based on higher-than-average cancer prevalence and community responsiveness. Based on our analysis, we also found that close to 50,000 families in Chicago qualify for Pickles Group’s support, demonstrating a sizeable unmet need.

We’re proud to support the organization’s work, and can wait to see the program expand in the future, better informed by data and community need.