Drury hires new SIFE team director

Josh Jones, a 2007 Drury graduate, started July 1 and will serve for two years while working on his Master of Business Administration at Drury. The position is typically held by a Drury graduate student who serves until completing a degree, Jones said.

Drury’s SIFE team, which has 41 members, has earned international acclaim with national championships in 2001, 2003 and 2005, and world championships in 2001 and 2003. As the team’s new leader, Jones said he hopes to maintain the group’s status as a top competitor.

“The way to do that is just to keep this large team that we have motivated day-by-day to keep working as hard as we can on projects, to be creative and find more ways to teach the principles of free enterprise and financial literacy success skills,” Jones said. “I feel like as long as we’re doing that, we’ll continue to see success from the team.”

Drury SIFE is gearing up to head next week to South Africa, where several hefty initiatives are planned, Jones said.

First, the team will help build two greenhouse-like food tents in Cape Town that will provide communities with sustainable fruit and vegetable sources.

The team later will work with an organization called Teen Challenge in Cape Town to teach at-risk teens how to build bio-sand water purification filters. The filters can be distributed to communities without access to clean drinking water, Jones said, and the teenagers will be left with the knowledge and resources to continue building filters as a sustainable microenterprise.

Lastly, the team will meet with representatives of the Ubuntu Institute in Johannesburg to offer advice and resources on setting up a small-business incubator. Drury SIFE has experience in that area, having opened Springfield’s first incubator, DSIFE, in 2004.

Later this month, the SIFE team will travel to the Dominican Republic to build three or four bio-sand water purification filters for a school in Punta Cana, Jones said. The team will leave behind business and marketing tools for the school to continue building filters.

This story originally appeared in SBJ’s July 10 free e-news Daily Update. Click here to register.