Drury SIFE team wins international championship

A team of students from Drury University won the Students in Free Enterprise World Cup 2003 International Championship Oct. 14 in Mainz, Germany.

Drury SIFE, the U.S. national champion, beat four other finalists: the national champion teams from Nigeria, Australia, Malaysia and New Zealand.

It is the schools second international championship; Drury won the inaugural 2001 World Cup in London.

Past experience has shown that in big-game situations, like this World Cup, the team is at their best, said Robert Wyatt, a faculty advisor for Drury SIFE and director of Drurys Breech School of Business, in a news release.

The 2003 World Cup title concludes an eventful summer for members of Drurys team. After winning the USA SIFE competition this spring, the team was pictured on 2 million Kelloggs cereal boxes, performed its winning USA SIFE presentation on Capitol Hill and was featured on CNNs Market Call and NBCs Today show.

In a 24-minute presentation at the World Cup event, five members of the Drury SIFE team focused on some of the 40 projects worked on last year, including:

Fostering Agricultural Renewal and Management FARM a program to help sustain family farming in southwest Missouri by teaching local farmers basic business skills;

the Southwest Missouri Business Ethics Coalition, which educates business people on ethical business practices and helps counsel them on specific questions;

Building for Tomorrow, in which Drury students travel to a middle school in Laredo, Texas, for a week-long program to teach children about business, ethics and cultural sensitivity;

HIGHER Hispanic Initiative for Growing Healthy Entrepreneurial Resources a two-day camp where Hispanic high-school students compete to develop the best business plan and the winning team receives $1,000 to start the business. The HIGHER entrepreneurship camp was featured on NBCs Today show Oct. 6.

All of the teams projects combine entrepreneurship and education to serve or improve a community.

Drury was named as a finalist on Oct. 13, after facing Brazil, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan, Slovenia and the Netherlands in the first round of competition. A total of 31 universities representing their countries participated in World Cup 2003.

Students in Free Enterprise is a global, nonprofit organization with headquarters in Springfield. Teams are active on 1,500 college and university campuses in 37 countries. University SIFE teams work in their communities to teach entrepreneurship, economics, business ethics, and financial and social responsibility to people who need or desire their help, according to the SIFE Web site, www.sife.org.

At the competition, the teams make detailed, multimedia presentations summarizing their projects to a panel of judges. Top business leaders from 11 countries judged the final round of the 2003 World Cup competition. To win at competition, teams must be able to demonstrate that their projects had an impact in their communities.