Last modified: Monday, March 26, 2007
IU SIFE team wins at regional competition
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 26, 2007
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The Indiana University-Bloomington SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) team has won the SIFE USA Regional Championship. The event, held on March 20, 2007, in Cincinnati, is among 17 SIFE USA Regional Competitions being held nationwide in March and April.
The IUB SIFE team won the regional championship after presenting a report of their yearlong community outreach projects to a panel of business leaders. With this victory, the team now advances to the national SIFE competition, which will be held at the SIFE USA National Exposition, May 6-8 in Dallas.
SIFE is an international non-profit organization active on more than 1,400 university campuses in 48 countries. SIFE teams create economic opportunities in their communities by organizing outreach projects that focus on market economics, entrepreneurship, personal financial success skills and business ethics.
IUB SIFE team members who presented at the Cincinnati regional competition included: Callie Blyze, Annie Cornett, Nicole Gump, Erin Hocker, Emily Hoover, Lauren Perri and Leela Summers.
"Our team's commitment to developing a program that created measurable community impact was very evident to the regional competition judges," said Mary Embry, a lecturer in the Indiana University Department of Apparel Merchandising & Interior Design (AMID) and the SIFE faculty advisor. "This victory validates our team's contribution of thousands of hours of local community outreach."
During the current academic year, the SIFE team organized 10 Bloomington-area projects, including a business ethics initiative in which IU apparel merchandising students worked with local community members to form Fair Trade Bloomington, a non-profit fair trade store that supports economic development opportunities through business cooperatives in the world's most poverty-stricken areas.
"Through the Fair Trade Bloomington project, our team obtained experience starting an entrepreneurial business and gained tremendous satisfaction knowing our work is growing the incomes of families worldwide. Fair Trade Bloomington will continue to allow our local community to contribute to this important global movement, " said Nichole Common, an IU apparel merchandising senior and SIFE entrepreneurship chair.
Indiana University's Department of Apparel Merchandising & Interior Design is a multidisciplinary academic environment within the university's College of Arts and Sciences that helps motivated students shape their futures in retail and design fields. The department's educational programs offer a blend of academic theory combined with practical knowledge and skill-building techniques to encourage critical, independent thinking by students and prepare graduates to be leaders in their chosen fields. Located in Memorial Hall on the IUB campus, AMID enrolled more than 450 undergraduate majors in the fall 2006 semester.
