HappyRant

Student competition blends business, giving back to communities

More positive trends in the world of business, this time at the up-and-coming level. Students from colleges and universities around the western US were in Seattle this week for the regional competition of SIFE, aimed at their business acumen on ways to give back to their communities.

Fifteen teams from colleges and universities from the West faced off as part of the annual regional competition for Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), an international nonprofit organization aimed at getting college students to create economic opportunities in their communities.

More about SIFE from their website...

Working in partnership with business and higher education, SIFE establishes student teams on university campuses. These teams are led by faculty advisors and they are challenged to develop community outreach projects that reach SIFE's five educational topics:

• Market Economics
• Success Skills
• Entrepreneurship
• Financial Literacy
• Business Ethics

The winners of the regional competitions move on to the national level, and ultimately to the SIFE World Cup.

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Dalai Lama Foundation launches Project Happiness

What's the real basis of happiness? A group of students from the US, Tibet, India, and Nigeria are in India right now exploring that very question. And as luck would have it, you'll be able to follow along in their exploration.

Inspired by His Holiness the Dalai Lama's book Ethics for the New Millennium, The Dalai Lama Foundation launched a documentary film and internet project called project happiness. The essence of this project is to engage young people in a cross-cultural dialogue about the relationship of happiness to one's values and ethics.

Here's how the Project Happiness web site describes the project:

Project Happiness follows a senior high school class from the Mount Madonna School near Watsonville, California on a journey to discover the true basis of human happiness. Joining them on this quest are the Tibetan and Indian students from the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala, India and the Dominion Heritage Academy in Jos, Nigeria.

Using the internet, video cameras, and other new communications technologies, the students will explore and create a new curriculum for His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s book Ethics for the New Millennium. Together the students will build bridges of understanding to learn about each other and themselves.

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Selflessness scholarship

When I went to business school in the 80's, it was at the height of the "greed is good" era. It took years before my inner do-gooder finally found its way to the surface. So I'm always impressed at the desire to do good I see in the current young generation.

In Indiana, for example, a student group is raising money for a "selflessness scholarship."

Karen Montgomery is doing more than earning a bachelor's degree at Butler University. The college senior also is working to promote and honor Hoosiers who put the needs of others ahead of their own.

Montgomery, 21, is one of the founding members of Butler's chapter of the John Weidner Foundation for Altruism, the nation's first collegiate affiliate of the organization. The national foundation was launched in 1992 in California by John Weidner, a Dutchman credited with saving more than 1,000 people from the Nazis during World War II.

"He risked everything," Montgomery said.

In that spirit, the Butler chapter is establishing the university's first student-driven scholarship and is raising $25,000 to endow the annual financial award, which would go to a student who exemplifies selflessness.

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Prison inmates help save dogs from doggie death row

Another prisoners and pets story. This one out of the Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas where prisoners are paired up with dogs from local shelters, training them to make them more adoptable pets.

Since August 2004, the Safe Harbor Prison Dog Program has brought animals destined for doggie death row at area shelters to inmates like McMullin for training as pets.

On any given day, about 50 dogs are being trained by some 100 inmates at the combined medium- and maximum-security prison. They frolic in a penned area in the shadow of guard towers and high fences, or splash in a plastic wading pool. Because they can be trained quicker as pets than as service animals, they're ready for adoption in just a couple of weeks.

About 1,200 dogs of all breeds and ages have been adopted under the program, financed by donations and a $150 adoption fee covering vaccinations, spaying or neutering.

More adopted dogs means more that can be rescued.

Obviously, that's good for the dogs, but it's good for the inmates as well.

McKune says what he believes to be the largest prison-based dog adoption program in the country helps reduce violence among inmates. "They may be having a crummy day and a dog comes up and starts licking them and things look better for them," he says...

...Dr. Joe Scroppo, director of North Shore University Hospital's forensic psychiatry program in Manhasset, N.Y., says limited research on inmates working with animals shows promising findings.

"It does have a positive impact on an inmate. It seems to decrease depression and other kinds of mental health problems. It's kind of like a therapy for them," says Scroppo, former supervising psychologist at New York City's Rikers Island jail.

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Multi-dimensional learning with The Learning Gardens Laboratory

Want to change the world? Get creative. Don't settle for the same ol' same ol'. Because the opportunities to take an alternative approach to positive change are endless.

Take The Learning Gardens Laboratory in Portland, Oregon, for example, which creates an intersection for multiple paths of learning and growth for students.

The Learning Gardens Laboratory, across the street from Lane Middle School, is a vibrant project that is strengthening ties between a diverse group of students and their families and communities. While they are growing vegetables for Lane’s cafeteria salad bar in the spring, students are learning skills in math, writing, sustainable agriculture, garden construction and cooperation.

...“The goal of Learning Gardens is to teach PPS and PSU students to grow food that enhances sustainable and healthy food systems, through hands-on experiences of urban learning gardens--and in so doing, also promote multicultural competence and academic achievement,” Williams says.

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Therapy dogs trained by inmates

If you hear the words prisoners and dogs, most likely the kind of dog that would come to mind would be a guard dog. A German Shepherd maybe, or a Rottweiler, trained to keep the prisoners in their place.

What you probably wouldn't think of is a symbiotic relationship that benefits both the prisoner and the dog, and ultimately benefits someone in the outside world. But with a program in the Indiana state prison system, that's exactly what you'll find. As this article describes:

ICAAN [Indiana Canine Assistant and Adolescent Network] is a nonprofit organization based in Indianapolis that partners with the Indiana Department of Correction. Inmates train assistance dogs for Indiana youth who require help because of a disability.

Some tasks ICAAN dogs are trained to perform include opening a refrigerator, turning a light switch on and off, retrieving a cordless phone or laundry from a dryer, pulling money from a bag to pay a cashier, and bracing someone to help them get up if they have fallen or to transfer from one seat to another.

Sally Irvin, founder of ICAAN, chose a prison-based training model so the dogs would receive constant and consistent instruction. As it turns out, the program is just as beneficial to inmates.

"It provides offender/handlers with meaningful work that challenges them, holds them accountable 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and pushes them to look at how they relate to the world around them. A person's style of dog training often parallels their relationships with people," she said.

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