[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 62 (Tuesday, April 29, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H3415-H3417]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




COMMENDING AND SUPPORTING EFFORTS OF STUDENTS IN FREE ENTERPRISE (SIFE)

  Mr. PORTER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the 
resolution (H. Res. 107) commending and supporting the efforts of 
Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), the world's preeminent collegiate 
free enterprise organization, and its president, Alvin Rohrs, as 
amended.
  The Clerk read as follows:

                              H. Res. 107

       Whereas the Nation knows the importance of supporting free 
     market thinking and the entrepreneurial spirit;
       Whereas Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) is the world's 
     preeminent collegiate free enterprise organization, and 
     provides leadership training, regional, national, and 
     international competitions, and career opportunity fairs for 
     thousands of university and college students;
       Whereas SIFE provides university and college students the 
     best opportunity to make a difference and to develop 
     leadership, teamwork, and communication skills through 
     learning, practicing, and teaching the principles of free 
     enterprise;
       Whereas SIFE is a force in promoting international business 
     awareness, through its operation in more than 33 countries of 
     the world, including former Soviet republics and China;
       Whereas SIFE is active on more than 1,400 university and 
     college campuses worldwide, involving students and faculties 
     in challenging competitions;
       Whereas SIFE promotes the entrepreneurial spirit while 
     reinforcing good business practice;
       Whereas SIFE encourages teamwork and education through 
     participation in learning projects and provides a competitive 
     framework that prepares students for business;
       Whereas SIFE gives students a forum to interact with 
     potential employers, as well as providing formal career fairs 
     and information;
       Whereas SIFE depends upon the support and involvement of 
     members of the faculty, whose advice and commitment are 
     essential; and
       Whereas SIFE benefits from the wider business community, 
     which appreciates SIFE's importance in shaping business 
     thinking in free enterprise: Now, therefore, be it
       Resolved, That the House of Representatives commends and 
     supports the efforts of Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), 
     the world's preeminent collegiate free enterprise 
     organization.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from 
Nevada (Mr. Porter) and the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis) each 
will control 20 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Nevada (Mr. Porter).


                             General Leave

  Mr. PORTER. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members 
may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks 
on House Resolution 107.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Nevada?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. PORTER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

                              {time}  1445

  Madam Speaker, I rise in support of H. Res. 107. This resolution 
recognizes the unique and important opportunities provided by the 
international organization Students in Free Enterprise. Active on more 
than 1,400 college and university campuses and more than 33 countries, 
SIFE collegiate teams improve the quality of life and the standard of 
living around the world by teaching the principles of market economics, 
entrepreneurship, business ethnics, and personal finance success. 
Currently, there are over 15,000 students involved with the SIFE 
chapter.
  Since 1975, SIFE college teams have been invited to attend leadership 
training programs where they learn the principles of free enterprise 
and develop leadership skills. Students return to their respective 
campuses where they conduct free enterprise outreach projects in their 
communities. Ultimately, the SIFE experience works to provide college 
and university students with the opportunity to make a difference in 
their local communities and develop leadership, teamwork and 
communication skills, skills that are important to lifelong career 
success.
  The postsecondary education experience is enriched when students have 
the opportunity to apply what they have learned in the classroom to the 
world around them. SIFE chapters are a means by which college students 
can expand their knowledge of the free enterprise system, compete in 
international competitions, and work in their local communities.
  Our Nation is facing a time of economic challenge. The growth and 
strength of the SIFE collegiate chapters and the escalating interest in 
the entrepreneurial spirit and sound business practices encourage me. 
Recognition is in order for the international organizations, Students 
in Free Enterprise, their board, and the individual chapters. I am 
happy to join the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Boozman) in honoring 
these organizations for their accomplishments. I urge my colleagues to 
support this resolution.
  Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. DAVIS of Illinois. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I 
may consume.
  Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor Students in Free Enterprise for 
their dedication and outstanding work. SIFE provides leadership 
training, regional competitions, and opportunity fairs for thousands of 
college students.
  Established in 1975, Students in Free Enterprise has rapidly grown to 
include more than 790 campuses nationwide, and now includes 
participants from 35 countries. Throughout the years and as the number 
of students grew, the mission of SIFE has remained the same: to provide 
college

[[Page H3416]]

and university students the best opportunity to make a difference and 
to develop leadership, teamwork, and communication skills through 
learning, practicing, and teaching the principles of free enterprise.
  With the number of corporate scandals and the high levels of distrust 
that is emanating from the business world today, SIFE gives a light of 
hope that our business leaders of tomorrow will have a solid 
understanding of principles and values and bring them into the business 
world.
  SIFE also encourages and demonstrates to college students the 
importance of community outreach. College students across the Nation 
participate in such programs that encourage the understanding of the 
responsible use of debit and credit cards and events that go into the 
local schools like Teach A Child About Business Week.
  The Students in Free Enterprise teams are learning important lessons 
that will help them in their adult lives, but it is more important that 
these students and the SIFE teams are extending their knowledge to 
their families, classmates, and neighbors.
  Madam Speaker, there are 25 colleges and universities in Illinois 
that participate and have SIFE teams. I am very proud and very pleased 
that two of the 25 are institutions with whom I have close and deep 
roots. One of them is Malcolm X College, where I have taught courses 
and where we hold many of our town hall meetings and other community 
outreach activities; and the other is Chicago State University where I 
was privileged to earn a master's degree and have been asked to give 
their commencement address this year on June 7. Both are outstanding 
institutions, one in my congressional district and one not.
  So once again I would like to congratulate Students in Free 
Enterprise for providing young people with the opportunity to make a 
difference and providing leadership training and inspiring young people 
to do what is right in both their personal and business lives. This is 
an excellent program. I commend the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. 
Boozman) for its introduction.
  Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back 
the balance of my time.
  Mr. PORTER. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from 
Arkansas (Mr. Boozman).
  Mr. BOOZMAN. Madam Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H. Res. 
107, a resolution commending and supporting the efforts of Students in 
Free Enterprise, and I thank the gentleman for bringing this resolution 
forward.
  Madam Speaker, I authored this resolution with the strong support of 
the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Blunt) to recognize Students in Free 
Enterprise, more commonly known as SIFE. SIFE is a nonprofit 
organization started in 1975, which seeks to instill in college 
students a greater appreciation for, and understanding of, the free 
enterprise system. Students in Free Enterprise has grown to become one 
of the largest university-based organizations in the world. SIFE teams 
are active on more than 1,400 college and university campuses in 33 
countries around the world. In my home State of Arkansas, we have SIFE 
teams on 18 university and college campuses. It is wonderful to see the 
opportunities that SIFE has provided to students across Arkansas.
  Working together as a team and through the mentorship of faculty 
advisers, SIFE students apply their classroom experiences to develop 
and implement educational outreach programs that teach individuals in 
their communities the principles of market economics, entrepreneurship, 
personal financial success, and business ethics.
  Madam Speaker, I will insert into the Record a copy of an article 
published by the Wall Street Journal on January 14, 2003, entitled 
``Program Puts College Students on Business-Leadership Paths.'' The 
article details a student who was the first in her family to go beyond 
high school and entered college with a vague dream of being a real 
estate broker. While attending community college, she found SIFE and 
went on to compete against other SIFE teams on the regional and 
national level. This former student has finished her bachelor's degree 
and is now the manager of the Washington, D.C. office of KPMG.
  Thousands of success stories just like this one are associated with 
SIFE and the efforts of their president, Alvin Rohrs. Mr. Rohrs is to 
be personally commended. Alvin Rohrs has been SIFE's president and 
chief executive officer since 1983. He successfully reversed the 
organization's fortunes by seeking a diverse board of directors to 
energize the organization.
  Rohrs was a SIFE chapter adviser at Southwest Baptist University in 
Missouri in 1983 when SIFE's national board hired him to try to reverse 
the organization's fortunes.
  SIFE started with a bang in 1975, but lost its spark in the early 
1980s as the U.S. economy faltered and SIFE's backers, large industrial 
corporations, cut their contributions. The roster of SIFE schools had 
shrunk from 100 in 1981 to 18 two years later. To get the energy back, 
Rohrs sought influential board members from half a dozen members in 
1983. SIFE's Free Enterprise Dream Team, what most of us would call a 
board of directors, now numbers more than 200 strong. Their board is 
comprised of presidents and CEOs from a wide variety of corporations, 
including Wal-Mart, Black & Decker, Valvoline, and American Greetings; 
and neither Rohrs nor his board believes the organization is close to 
reaching its potential.
  Madam Speaker, I commend Mr. Rohrs on his 20-year anniversary as 
president of SIFE, and I recognize the incredible organization that has 
made a difference in the lives of millions. I encourage my colleagues 
to vote their support of H. Res. 107.
  The aforementioned article is as follows:

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 14, 2003]

       Program Puts College Students On Business-Leadership Paths

       When Carole Clay Withers enrolled at Walters State 
     Community College in Morristown, TN, 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.
       Then she found SIFE, or Students in Free Enterprise. 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, DC, 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 villages 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

[[Page H3417]]

     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 percent of management trainees hired by Wal-
     Mart are SIFE alumni. RadioShack in 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 5 or 
     10 years. And most beneficial of all, I learned how to talk 
     to people and interact with them.''

  Mr. PORTER. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from 
Missouri (Mr. Blunt).
  Mr. BLUNT. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this 
time.
  I am pleased to be here with the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. 
Boozman) to recognize this important institution. Free enterprise and 
what free enterprise means to the world is best learned at the earliest 
possible time, and that is exactly what Students in Free Enterprise 
does. It is located in my district in Springfield, Missouri, but is 
truly all over the world. There are over 1,400 chapters in 33 different 
countries; and in many of those countries, the SIFE chapter, the 
Students in Free Enterprise chapter, becomes the first time the door is 
really opened in the lives of many students to the whole idea of free 
enterprise, the whole idea of a competitive system and individuals who 
are able to move forward largely based on their own capacity and their 
own talents.
  SIFE offers students the opportunities to develop leadership, to 
develop teamwork, to develop communication skills through learning, 
practicing, through teaching principles of free enterprise that are 
valuable in improving the standard of living for millions of people in 
the world.
  SIFE chapters compete against each other in national and now even 
international competitions to see which chapters can come up with the 
most competitive ways to talk about and to expand the concepts of free 
enterprise. This is an idea that is supported by businesses around the 
globe. More than 185 top corporate executives sit on SIFE's board of 
directors. That board is led by Alvin Rohrs, who has given 20 years of 
his life toward growing this organization from literally a handful of 
campus units in America to 1,400 universities in 33 different 
countries.
  SIFE teams teach important concepts through educational outreach 
projects. They teach market economics, entrepreneurship, personal and 
financial success, business ethics, and benefit their community as they 
plan for the future of their community.
  Each year SIFE competitions are held worldwide, drawing together 
thousands of students, all of whom are there to honor one concept, the 
concept of free enterprise, the concept of capitalism, the concept that 
we have such a great opportunity through SIFE and many other ways to 
demonstrate in the world today. I am pleased to join the gentleman from 
Arkansas (Mr. Boozman) as he encourages our colleagues to adopt this 
resolution honoring Students in Free Enterprise.
  Mr. PORTER. Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I 
yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Biggert). The question is on the motion 
offered by the gentleman from Nevada (Mr. Porter) that the House 
suspend the rules and agree to the resolution, H. Res. 107, as amended.
  The question was taken; and (two-thirds having voted in favor 
thereof) the rules were suspended and the resolution, as amended, was 
agreed to.
  The title of the resolution was amended so as to read: ``Resolution 
commending and supporting the efforts of Students in Free Enterprise 
(SIFE), the world's preeminent collegiate free enterprise 
organization.''.
  A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.

                          ____________________