June 2004
Members of the B-W chapter of Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) traveled to Mexico with adviser Sandra Stark, Director of the B-W Entrepreneurship Center, in December. There, they taught residents of a small village how to make candles from wax that is extracted from native plants. The candles are a valuable commodity in nearby remote areas with no electricity.
Villagers have long sold the wax by the barrel to companies that use it as a raw material, but received only food coupons in payment. Thanks to our SIFE students, now these villagers have a product to sell. They also suggested the wax might be used for dry-erase boards.
Knowing they would be unlikely to return, the SIFE students met with business students and faculty at the Universidad Anahauc in Mexico City, helping them to establish a SIFE chapter there. It was hoped the Mexican chapter would continue working with the village.
Traveling to Mexico were Michael Lagoni, a sophomore business major from Ashtabula who is president of the B-W SIFE chapter; Meghan Pethtel, a freshman business major from Geneva; Steven Dieterle, a sophomore economics major from Mentor, and Oscar Villarreal, a freshman pre-engineering major whose home is in Mexico.“Just opening the entrepreneurial mindset, helping them to realize they can use this natural resource for other projects – that was the most beneficial part,” Lagoni said.
Their project won a regional SIFE competition in April and advanced to the national competition in late May in Kansas City. “While the competition was excellent, the real value in the experience was in the process of selecting, planning and executing each project,” said Phil Bessler, Herzog Professor of Free Enterprise and also a B-W SIFE faculty adviser. “The experience that the B-W students had is a real lesson that they will be able to apply throughout their academic and professional careers.”
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