Through Golub Capital Board Fellows Program, Damidera David-Olusa Helps The Forbes Funds Build for the Future

The Forbes Funds was established in 1982, when delays in state funding often left Pittsburgh-area nonprofits struggling to meet payroll and other operating expenses. Grants from The Forbes Funds helped bridge those funding shortfalls.

Over the years, the organization expanded beyond grant making to offer executive coaching, peer cohort groups, and educational programs for nonprofit leaders. The Forbes Funds serves more than 2,500 nonprofits a year with an annual budget of $2.2 million.

“Capacity building just looks different in 2026 than it did in 1982,” said Olivia Benson, chief operating officer of The Forbes Funds. “We want to meet nonprofits where they are while helping prepare them for the future.”

Its educational programs cover a range of topics, including how nonprofit leaders can integrate artificial intelligence into their organizations – technology that many nonprofits have been slow to embrace because of limited resources and staff.

The goal is to show nonprofits how to adopt AI – rather than “wait for AI to adopt them,” Benson said.

Guidance for a New Chapter

For more than 40 years, The Forbes Funds helped other nonprofits navigate financial and organizational challenges while operating under The Pittsburgh Foundation’s oversight. In 2024, as The Forbes Funds evolved to become an independent nonprofit, it sought guidance of its own from the Tepper School of Business.

The Tepper School’s Golub Capital Board Fellows program pairs MBA students with nonprofits to serve as non-voting board members and to complete a strategic project for their organization.

“What better way to build capacity as we’re thinking about how we can shift our operations than by working with students who understand the business community better than anyone on our team,” Benson said.

Damidera David-Olusa, MBA ’26, became a Board Fellow because she wanted to connect her corporate experience in Nigeria with the nonprofit sector in the United States. Before coming to the Tepper School, David-Olusa had worked as a senior product marketing manager at Jumia, a large African e-commerce company.

“Becoming a Board Fellow was a way to see how my MBA, my business experience and the nonprofit world could all come together when I start working full-time,” David-Olusa said.

She started her fellowship as The Forbes Funds was making the transition to become an independent nonprofit. She helped develop a board committee structure, recommending governance, financial audits, and executive committees.

“We never had a board committee structure before because we didn’t need it when we were a supporting organization of the Pittsburgh Foundation,” Benson said.

With her background in marketing, David-Olusa also worked on strengthening The Forbes Funds’ brand identity and finding new ways to use its data to communicate with board members, stakeholders, and staff.

Benson said one challenge she frequently sees among nonprofit partners is a lack of an entrepreneurial mindset. David-Olusa saw the opportunity to apply that same mindset to The Forbes Funds’ own operations. She used the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a framework for turning an organization’s vision into day-to-day operations.

In interviews, she found that stakeholders understood the organization’s overall mission but were less familiar with its formal vision statement. She wanted to make that vision something they could use in their day-to-day work, rather than a statement “that lived on a website or in a slide deck,” David-Olusa said. Her blueprint included new purpose statements for internal and external audiences, core values for employees, and metrics for execution and decision-making -- tools designed to translate the organization’s vision into its everyday work.

David-Olusa gave the board confidence in the organization’s plans, which was “critical,” Benson said. “She gave the staff a blueprint to walk through, which was great. And she talked to stakeholders about where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we could go, which was wonderful,” Benson said. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that without a Board Fellow stepping into those roles.”

Putting Strategy Into Practice

For David-Olusa, attending board meetings underscored the importance of preparation. Reviewing board materials in advance, she observed, was vital for meaningful participation and effective consensus-building. She also learned the distinction between governance and operations: Board members need to maintain a bird’s-eye view of a nonprofit organization while understanding enough about its day-to-day work to provide effective oversight.

Her fellowship gave her a chance to put her organizational strategy coursework at the Tepper School into practice. “My project at The Forbes Funds pushed me to apply those concepts to a real setting, rather than just discussing them in theory,” she said. “I also developed a deeper understanding of board responsibilities and their fiduciary duties, all of which were alien to me prior to this program.

“My engagement in the project also highlighted how governance decisions ripple through the organization, even though the board is not involved in the day-to-day operations.”

After graduating from the Tepper School this past Spring, David-Olusa now plans to take her experience in strategy and organizational transformation into consulting, with an interest in helping organizations in the philanthropic, public-sector, and education spaces navigate strategic and organizational challenges.

“The skill sets that you harness in a nonprofit can also be applied in a professional setting,” she said. “Now I know how to adopt an Entrepreneurial Operating System, and that’s value-add to my business.”