SIFE: Changing the World
Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), a global non-profit group active in more than 40 countries, is the world's top collegiate free enterprise organization. SIFE helps train tomorrow's leaders who are making a difference in their communities today. Combining community service, competition and career prep, SIFE is networking at its best.
Community Outreach
"SIFE believes that if we can help people understand capitalism and free enterprise, we can help them improve their standard of living and their quality of life."
—SIFE co-advisor Susan Vowels
SIFE team members change the world by educating those around them about five key principles of capitalism and free enterprise: Market Economics, Success Skills, Entrepreneurship, Financial Literacy and Business Ethics.
SIFE allows students to create their own projects, to affect the changes they want to see in the community. This year, SIFE will teach middle-schoolers how to run their own business, conduct investing workshops for community members 65 and older, and give college students the tools they need to manage their credit.
Past projects have included
- A six-week long program teaching young girls from the community about the value of money, and paying them to start saving
- A pick-up basketball game with local middle school boys incorporating lessons about leadership and teamwork
- A Career Expo preparing Washington College students for the annual Career Fair
- Completing market research for a group of retired community members who used the information to found a company to help local senior citizens living alone
Competitions
"SIFE is actually a service organization that also sponsors competitions."
—Susan Vowels
SIFE team members might have a good time teaching important life skills such as electronic ethics and international etiquette, but when they don their black suits to showcase their projects at annual competitions, they're all business.
At competitions, team members have 24 minutes to present their community projects. Teams are judged based on how well their project met their goals and conveyed the five SIFE principles. In 2003, a project that taught business ethics to schoolchildren won the regional award and was a finalist at the national level.
Over the past five years at the regional competition, Washington College's team has made an impression on the judges, and when the judges are executives from prominent national companies including Unilever, Walgreens, Kraft Foods and Wells Fargo, their decisions can lead to more than just a trophy...it can lead to a job.
Career Opportunities
"Students get something similar to work experience in SIFE because they're team leaders and team participants."
—Susan Vowels