Last weekend, BYU-Hawaii hosted the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) statewide training meeting which featured regional program director, Jennifer Koza. Saturday, November 5, SIFE members and advisors assembled in the Aloha Center to take part in this important meeting where changes in the program and judging were discussed.
SIFE is an international, non-profit organization that has teams in over47 nations on more than 1,800 university and college campuses worldwide. It focuses on teaching students the following concepts: market economics, financial literacy, business ethics, entrepreneurship, and success skills. SIFE students then focus on educating their communities in these business concepts to help better small companies and community members, and the effects are wide-reaching.
Four universities and colleges were represented that morning: Hawaii PacificUniversity, Remington College, Leeward Community College, and BYU-Hawaii. The gathering provided an opportunity to the SIFE teams to get to know each other better and build ties with the schools in order to get help, if needed, on future projects. At the beginning of the meeting, Koza asked the participants to introduce themselves and share some of their thoughts about SIFE.
Some thoughts included:
"SIFE makes a difference;"
"SIFE isn't about competition, it's about the impact we can make;"
"SIFE is goal oriented and uplifting;" and,
"SIFE is hands on learning -- an application of the things learned in classes."
Also in attendance that morning from BYU-Hawaii were Bill Neal, assistant to President Eric B. Shumway, and BYU-Hawaii's SIFE team co-advisor, and Richie Norton from the Alumni Office and SIFE mentor. Norton added, "Iam indebted to SIFE because of the help I've received from SIFE on three projects I've been working on."
Some of those projects include Square Foot Gardening, an innovative gardening technique utilizing small plots of land to produce a year's worth of vegetables. Another project assisted BYU-Hawaii alumnaAriunchimeg Tserenjavin, whose startup company in Mongolia, "Ariuna Cashmere, "exports and produces cashmere products.
The BYU-Hawaii SIFE team ranked among the top 40 in the nation last Mayat the national competition in Kansas City, and they have hopes that they can make it to nationals again this year. Unfortunately, due to some budget issues on the national level, regionals for Hawaii have been changed to California,and theSIFE team might not be able to participate this year because of that change unless funding is available.
The training was a success as the four teams had many opportunities to gather information and learn from each other. As the meeting came to an end, hopes were expressed by all that regionals would return to Hawaii and give these hardworking students a chance to show their national peers what they can do.