Two Monroe College SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) teams were big winners at this year’s Regional SIFE competitions, held April 7 in Hartford, Connecticut. The Monroe College two-year SIFE team was named Regional Champions for the second consecutive year and the Monroe College four-year team won as first runner-up, also for the second year in a row.

In addition to the championship, the Monroe two-year SIFE team swept the individual topic competition in the four main SIFE criteria: National Free Market Economics, National Entrepreneurship, National Personal Financial Success Skills, and National Business Ethics.

As a result of their excellence, the twenty-two member two-year team, which is based on the Monroe Bronx campus, will participate in the National SIFE Competition in Kansas City, Missouri to be held on May 22-25.

The two-year team’s winning entry consisted of nineteen different projects they had worked on. In each, they used their training in business management and marketing to better the community. Their 24-minute multi-media presentation included an interactive video that the SIFE tech committee produced.

"Certainly it’s very gratifying to win," said Monroe SIFE President Cecil Wright, a Business Management major. "But what’s more important is the numbers of people we’ve helped along the way and the impact we’ve had on their lives."

The winning projects included Children Making Cents, in which SIFE students taught Bronx children aged 6-17 the importance of savings and how to open bank accounts. More than 135 children attended the seminar conducted by SIFE students. They then were taken on a tour of Commerce Bank, which included an inside look at an actual bank vault.

In evaluating the Monroe presentation as well as the effectiveness of the projects, one of the judges exclaimed, "Out of all the years that I have served as a judge for these competitions, this is the best that I have ever seen!"