Dear Participants in Chaminade University’s Service-Learning Program and Vegetarian Society of Hawaii (VSH) Super Board Members,
I’d very much like to thank Chaminade University’s Professor Wayne Tanna, Director of Service-Learning Candice Sakuda, and students Poerava Gantt, Corinne Irons, Clare Xiaoxiao Niu and Joey Ruiz for a wonderful experience that VSH Community Liaison Denise Snyder and I had with them as part of a recently concluded service learning course offered by Chaminade’s Business department.
During the fall 2012 semester, as I’ve mentioned previously, the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii had a great opportunity to serve as a sponsoring community organization for Chaminade University’s BU 470 Senior Field Experience course, taught by Professor Tanna. The course description follows:
BU 470 Senior Field Experience (3)
This course is designed to connect students’ coursework in business to the operations of a real-world organization and to facilitate their transition from student to professional. Student teams function as consultants, with the guidance of a Faculty Supervisor, to analyze an organizational situation, develop recommendations, and implement an appropriate project in a sponsoring community organization. Teams accomplish their project, complete a project report and group process assessment, and present their results. Service -Learning Course. Offered every semester. Prerequisites: BU 469.
Denise applied for us with Candice Sakuda, I believe. VSH was accepted, and Denise and I gave a joint talk including a PowerPoint presentation about VSH, including our mission, why we believe our mission to be important and of service to the community, our history, our activities, our challenges, and our hopes for the future, to Professor Tanna’s class of 15 students on September 7. Eventually, we were contacted, and Denise and I had our first meeting on October 29 with the student team of four who would serve as our consultants. We gave them a good amount of information about our organization during the weeks of the project and asked that they help us to update our image, to increase awareness of our organization and our mission and to help us increase student involvement on the college campus.
Denise and I found this project, on the VSH end, to be both challenging and satisfying. We greatly enjoyed meeting with and interacting with some fine young people whom we hope will continue to offer their expertise and talents in service to others and to good causes to help the world. They worked hard to give us the best possible help they could during the limited time they had with us. We were thrilled to be present at their final presentation. We thank them for their good analysis of our organization, and for coming up with some very good ideas for increasing our membership and income, plus attractive and creative graphics makeovers for possible use for our logo, newsletter, T-shirts and membership application brochure, and free bus advertisements!
Denise and I appreciated Chaminade University’s and Director Candice Sakuda’s commitment to service-learning in offering such courses, and hope this worthy program will continue. We were especially grateful to Professor Wayne Tanna for teaching this course. He ably guides students in seeing how they can apply what they’re learning in their business studies not only to benefit for-profit businesses, but non-profit organizations, as well, while acting as consultants to help a real-life community organization, in this case, VSH!
