MONROE SIFE MAKES THE NATIONALS!

On Friday, April 3, the Monroe College SIFE Team won a Regional Competition and as a result will advance to the SIFE USA National Exposition on May 12-14 in Philadelphia, PA. This is the sixth consecutive year that Monroe will participate in the Nationals. In 2005 the Monroe College SIFE team was a National SIFE Champion and they were featured on the Kellogg's Corn Flakes box.

SIFE, which stands for Students in Free Enterprise, is an international organization that encourages students to apply what is learned in the classroom toward making communities better. SIFE teams from participating colleges present their projects in an inter-active multi-media format to be judged by corporate executives.

This year's Monroe SIFE projects were written up in their annual report called, Our World Begins Here . In addition to continuing long-term projects like Cupid in Business, where the students provide women in shelters with motivational skills, vocational training, and financial literacy and Money Making Matters, in which the SIFE team teaches financial literacy and market economics to people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, SIFE added Some Place Special for Kids, a project that provides economic expertise to families in Ghana in hopes of preventing child trafficking.

"The Monroe SIFE program continues to grow," said Sam Walton Fellow Professor Tilokie Depoo, the team's Faculty Advisor. "Certainly qualifying for the nationals is important," he added, "but the real value of the students' work is in the hundreds, no thousands, of lives Monroe SIFE students have impacted. That's the true value of SIFE at Monroe."

Other SIFE projects included the Monroe College Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence which provides training for aspiring business owners, and D.R.I.V.E., a program that is geared toward teaching entrepreneurship and business ethics.

SIFE also has educational and developmental value for the thirty team members themselves. For example, At the Regional Competition, which was held at the Marriott in Tarrytown, NY, there was a job fair for companies that were obviously interested in talking with SIFE students about internships and careers.

Of the 35 colleges who participated in the Regionals, the Monroe SIFE team won three Individual Topic awards for excellence in Entrepreneurship, Success Skills, and Market Economics.They also finished first in SIFE's Let's Can Hunger Regional Competition for collecting canned goods/non-perishable food items.