Students excel in classroom through service
Not many students plan on doing service projects in their business classes when they sign up for them each semester.
Students from James Hayton’s management and human resources class were given an assignment in which they needed to apply the principles they had learned during the semester by giving service.
Jared Johnstun, a management and human resources junior, said the class was organized into groups.
Some groups designed projects which would help needy members of the community. Johnstun’s group worked with 20 elementary kids from Edith Bowen Laboratory School. He said the group really wanted to have a project where kids were able to help other kids.
Finance senior Allen McNeil worked with Johnstun for this project. McNeil said the group got information about the Festival of Trees in Salt Lake City from Primary Children’s Medical Center, which receives all proceeds of the event. They had to get corporate and private sponsors to help fund their tree and its decoration.
The kids from Edith Bowen painted the ornaments and other decorations to match the tree’s theme of “Stars of America.” A few of the group members took the tree to Salt Lake’s South Towne Expo Center on Monday for the festival, McNeil said.
D.J. King, who is majoring in finance and economics, participated with Johnstun and McNeil. King said the kids covered the tree skirt with red, white and blue hand prints to go along with the theme.
The most important thing is how the project benefits everyone involved, he said.
“It benefits the sick kids at Primary Children’s. It benefits the students who have been learning how to manage stuff like this,” he said.
Many of the Edith Bowen students helped, because they knew the tree would help kids their age who are sick, King said.
“It was a really cool project,” he said.
The tree was sold by Thursday night, McNeil said, though the event lasts until Christmas. The group won’t know how much money their tree raised, but the minimum price was $500.
“It turned out a lot better than any of us expected,” McNeil said.
Some projects might have been easier, he said, but this one was definitely worth the effort.
Johnstun said the difficult part was not being able to do everything. The purpose of the project is to organize and manage. He also said it was tough to work in a big group with everyone’s busy schedules.
“A lot of us liked working with kids,” he said.
That was all the incentive many of the group members needed, Johnstun said.
Kristin Mumford, a junior in accounting, was a member of another group. She said her group organized a food drive back in November. Her group’s Stuff Cache Valley project helped gather food with the Cache Community Food Pantry.
“We called up the food pantry, and they said they needed lots of food for the holidays,” Mumford said.
Chrissy Beardall, a business information systems senior, said the group had to then write up a mission statement declaring exactly what it wanted to accomplish.
“We knew we needed a lot of advertising,” Beardall said.
They worked with the radio stations and newspapers to let members of the community know volunteers would be coming to gather food in their neighborhoods, she said.
“Getting a lot of people to volunteer was tougher than you might think,” Beardall said.
Mumford said nearly 50 people collaborated to gather more than 3,200 pounds of food.
After gathering the food, members of the group delivered the donations to the food pantry and separated the food to be used for different purposes during the holidays.
–jonryan@cc.usu.edu