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Program Puts College Students On Business-Leadership Paths

When Carole Clay Withers enrolled at Walters State Community College in Morristown, Tenn., 15 years ago, she had never flown in an airplane or eaten in a restaurant with tablecloths. The first member of her family to go beyond high school, she wanted to see more of the world than her native rural Tennessee and had a vague dream of becoming a real-estate broker.

By CAROL HYMOWITZ Wall St. Journal

Then she found SIFE, or Students in Free Enterprise http://sife.org/ . When her economics professor talked up the nonprofit organization, based in Springfield, Mo., as a place where she could learn about business firsthand by doing entrepreneurial projects with fellow students, "I flew down the hall to sign up," says Ms. Withers.

Her five-person SIFE team taught business concepts to elementary-school students by creating coloring books that showed how crops planted in the region eventually were marketed and sold world-wide.

The team competed against other college SIFE teams in regional and national contests, where they were judged by corporate executives. "When my team made it to the finals at the national championship in Kansas City, and I stood on the stage fielding questions from the judges, I felt my life had changed," says Ms. Withers. "I realized that if I could answer all the questions being posed by some of the country’s most powerful executives, I had what I needed to become an executive myself."

She completed her bachelor’s degree in accounting and now is a manager at the Washington, D.C., office of KPMG. "If not for SIFE, I would probably be working in a low-paid factory job," she says.

SIFE is offering a lesson all good managers should help to teach: that business is a part of the fabric of every community, that it is a skill that needs to be learned by everyone to some degree in order to survive, and that the smallest venture can have world-wide reach.

SIFE has chapters at 797 colleges nationwide and more than 500 schools overseas, providing opportunities for students who come from modest backgrounds and have little exposure to big business. It has spread to elite campuses such as Notre Dame and Harvard in recent years, but its roots are in smaller schools in the Midwest and South.

Yet its mission — igniting an early passion for business innovation and leadership by challenging students to launch projects in their communities — is global in scope and sophisticated in its approach. "We encourage students to take what they learn in an economics class and use it to show others how free enterprise can improve lives," says Alvin Rohrs, president and chief executive of SIFE.

Last year, five SIFE students from the University of Ghana, in Accra, taught 20 villagers in Kpomkpo how to make soap from locally available coconut and palm oil. Production began after three weeks of training, with help from Ghana’s women’s ministry. The initial trainees have since trained others, launching a cottage industry.

Founded 23 years ago, SIFE received much-needed help from Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and his then-chief operating officer, Jack Shewmaker, in the mid-1980s. "It developed just like Wal-Mart, in small towns that didn’t have a lot of other resources," says Jack Kahl, former CEO of Cleveland-based Henkel Consumer Adhesives and a longtime SIFE board member.

Over the past decade, SIFE has expanded rapidly and recruited almost 200 executives to its board, currently headed by Thomas Coughlin, president and CEO of Wal-Mart. Some other companies represented on the board are 3M, Black & Decker, Coca-Cola, AT&T, ConAgra, Nestle and Pfizer. Along with judging regional, national and the international World Cup SIFE competitions, board members farm talent from SIFE teams. Some 35% of management trainees hired by Wal-Mart are SIFE alumni. RadioShack is another heavy recruiter.

Luke Robinson, who last year earned an M.B.A. from La Sierra University, Riverside, Calif., says his experience as president of the school’s SIFE team from 2000 to 2002 altered his ambitions. "I went from being a back-office, analytic accounting type to being quite at ease in front of large crowds and wanting a front-room leadership position," he says.

His team, which won the World Cup championship last year, launched more than a dozen projects, including a child-care business course in Riverside that helped about 200 welfare mothers establish day-care businesses; a campus cleaning business; a cow bank in Karandi, India, which purchased 20 milking cows for families to help start a small dairy business; and a llama bank in Peru.

"As a student you’re often discounted as wet behind the ears, but in SIFE we came up with ideas and showed they could work," says Mr. Robinson, a grants manager for La Sierra’s business school and a consultant to small businesses in the area. "In SIFE, I got project-management experience that lots of people don’t get until they’ve been working for five or 10 years. And most beneficial of all, I learned how to talk to people and interact with them."

(Participating schools in Montana are:

Montana State University-Northern
Havre

Rocky Mountain College
Billings

University of Great Falls
Great Falls )

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