For Dr. Julie Olberding, philanthropy and education are inseparable. Olberding is the director of NKU’s Master of Public Administration (MPA) program and the 2024 recipient of the university’s Frank Sinton Milburn Award for Outstanding Professor. In the 20 years since she was hired on at NKU as a lecturer, she has been committed to showing students how they can make a difference outside of the classroom—a commitment she carried over from her previous career working in the nonprofit sector.

“When I started teaching, I wanted to have my students be engaged with real organizations,” Dr. Olberding says. “Then I found out about the Mayerson Student Philanthropy project, and it was another interesting, cool way to connect students to the community in the region around issues that we were studying.”

When she started working as a full-time faculty member in 2005, she began to participate in the project—which gives students in a course a sum of money to donate to a nonprofit of their choice—and stepped up to become its faculty director three years later.

“I would probably still be directing,” she says, “except for the fact that my department needed somebody to lead the MPA program. So I only did it for two years, but I would have done it for longer if I could have.”

The typical model for a course participating in the Mayerson program provides the class with $2,000 from a local foundation or funder. The faculty member in charge builds the content of the course around the fund, but the students ultimately make the decision about which nonprofit they will put the money toward. Dr. Olberding frequently participates with courses in public administration like “Foundations of Public Service” or “Volunteer and Community Engagement.”

In the latter, which she taught this fall, she had her students develop community profiles for the northern Kentucky area development district, strategic communication plans and ideas for board engagement.

“From my own experience as a student and seeing students over the past 20 years, it’s more exciting to do something that's going to have impact beyond the classroom than to just take a bunch of quizzes or write a paper that only the professor is going to see,” Dr. Olberding says. “They’re more engaged and invested in their own learning.”

She also stresses just how much $2,000 can mean for a nonprofit organization.

“Last fall we worked with a few nonprofits, and one of their budgets was $50,000 and the other was $100,000. With $2,000, you’re either serving more people, expanding your reach or doing something that you didn't think you could do before,” she says.

Recently, she has begun to innovate the traditional Mayerson course model, employing ideas like “indirect giving,” which donates students’ time and efforts rather than a sum of money. In one course, students reviewed real grant applications submitted to Toyota’s and Duke Energy’s corporate foundations. At the end of the semester, a few students went to their corporate headquarters to represent the class with their recommendations.

“They were in suits sitting at the table with some of the, top people at thesefunding arms of the corporations,” she says. “They were very nervous, but they stepped up to it. When I reached back out to the corporations, they told us that what the students said really mattered. It wasn’t just superficial.”