[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.
____________________