SIFE Brandon Earns Top Honours

BRANDON UNIVERSITY team earns top honours for environmental efforts
Local students named regional champions for work with city’s east
end community

Toronto, ON – Brandon University’s Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE)
team has been named the 2011 Scotiabank & SIFE Go Green Challenge
Regional Champion by national charitable organization Advancing Canadian
Entrepreneurship (ACE) and proud program supporter Scotiabank. SIFE is a
team based program that encourages post secondary students to address
relevant economic, social and environmental issues by empowering others
to improve their quality of life and standard of living.

“Being named a Scotiabank and SIFE Go Green Regional Champions is an
amazing accomplishment and really shows that what we do makes a large
difference to our community”, comments Jonathan Fung, SIFE Team
President. “By having this exposure we hope that our Green Futures
program can expand to other communities helping them increase
environmental awareness, quality of life and standard of living.”

Student teams from across Western Canada showcased their
environmental-focused projects to panels of industry professionals on
March 14, 2011. The SIFE team from Brandon University stood out to the
judges because of their dedication to providing their community with a
way to learn, give back and be involved.

Green Futures is a community garden initiative that is creating
economic opportunity, increasing environmental awareness, and improving
Manitoba communities. The SIFE team established a land lease agreement
with the City of Brandon and created 45 raised garden beds at the East
End Community Centre. This project provides families and members of the
community with an opportunity to grow their own vegetables as well as a
hands-on learning environment for students of King George Elementary
School. The team’s largest accomplishments through Green Futures
include; growing 900+ lbs of food, positively impacting 200 community
members and an expansion plan for an additional 85 beds in 2011.

“Scotiabank is proud to support this great educational program which
provides youth with valuable resources to guide them through their
entrepreneurial endeavours,” said Pete Molenaar, Scotiabank Area Vice
President, Alberta Commercial. “The Scotiabank & SIFE Go Green Challenge
is unique in that it teaches and ignites young minds to create brighter
futures for themselves and their communities. We congratulate all of the
competing school teams on their creative and engaging projects.”

“With environmental awareness being such an important topic, we are
thankful to Scotiabank for leading this initiative across Canada”,
explains Amy Harder, ACE President. “The results from our SIFE teams
that we have competed to date are outstanding. They are positively
affecting their local communities today and building a better Canada for
tomorrow.”

The end goal of this annual challenge is for SIFE teams to provide
others with the knowledge required to make positive environmental
decisions, both in their personal and professional lives. Teams have
been provided the necessary tools and training from ACE and Scotiabank
to develop and implement their extensive projects. The Brandon
University team will now move on to the national level of competition
taking place on May 10th at the 2011 ACE National Exposition in Toronto,
ON.

About ACE
ACE is a national, charitable organization that is teaching and
igniting young Canadians to create brighter futures for themselves and
their communities. ACE delivers a team-based program called Students In
Free Enterprise (SIFE) and an individual-based program, Student
Entrepreneur. ACE students created 540 jobs, logged 273,000 volunteer
hours and directly impacted 114,000 people in the past year alone. In
the past three years, students have generated over $80,000,000 in
economic opportunity. ACE is currently established on over 55
post-secondary campuses across Canada.

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Contact:

Jaime Szegvary
Communications Consultant, ACE
416.619.8994
jaime@acecanada.ca

Deborah Clark
Corporate Media Communications, Scotiabank
416-933-0646
deborah_clark@scotiacapital.com

Monique Pantel,
Media Relations, SIFE Brandon team
204.573.8777
moniquepantel@sifebrandon.com

Contact