Students’ Entrepreneurial Skills on Display
Throughout this semester the Finance team of the Hearts & Hands Project in Dr. Luke Pittaway’s Applied Small Business class at Georgia Southern University has designed and created bracelets with Georgia Southern’s blue, white, and gold colors. The idea for the bracelet project came from class member Hannah Shedd. She has designed and created jewelry for several years mainly just as presents for family and friends through forming H. Ruth Designs, and saw this project as a way for her to utilize her designing skills in a way to raise money for Project 5 Stacks. All proceeds are benefiting Statesboro’s Hearts and Hands Clinic.
The Hearts and Hands clinic is a Volunteers in Medicine Alliance. It is a free clinic for those who are uninsured in the Statesboro area. With 20% of Georgia’s population being unemployed, they have quite a feat to accomplish. The clinic is open to see patients two Tuesdays a month by a general practitioner and if they need additional, specific care there are 12 specialists who see patients, free of charge, during their office hours. Hearts and Hands also has 13 dentists that volunteer their time, space and equipment to taking care of patients. Everything that patient needs is taken care of by the clinic from filing claims and paperwork to providing free prescriptions.
Dr. Pittaway’s Applied Small Business two groups where one group has the goal of raising 5,000 pounds of food for Campbell’s Let’s Can Hunger initiative and the other group has the goal of raising $5,000 for the Hearts and Hands clinic. But, in the spirit of small business the groups are being graded on the innovation of their fundraising/can raising events and how successful their events are in obtaining their goals, among other criteria decided by the acting CEOs of each initiative.
The Finance team is part of the group raising $5,000 for the clinic under the name Project 5 Stacks.
Through this bracelet sale project the Finance team created 50 bracelets to sell on consignment at Gray’s Bookstore. The sales are going well at the bookstore and also through personal sales of the bracelets to friends and family.
As a result of the bracelet sale project, Finance team member Hannah Shedd has actually received requests from coworkers and friends to design other jewelry for them. It is the goal of the Applied Small Business class is that the class members learn how to utilize their entrepreneurship skills and through the results of the bracelet sales project and the increased increase in interest of people in the Hannah Shedd’s jewelry design group (H. Ruth Designs) it is apparent that the class is learning how to utilize their skills.
Future plans for the bracelet sale project involve selling bracelets at the 1st Annual Kiwanis Rodeo on April 15 and 16, 2011 and 7:30pm both nights at the Fair Grounds located in Statesboro, GA.
Written by: Hannah Shedd
Posted in Clubs, Teaching and Learning