The Saint

Story by Alex Rodriguez, Sports Editor

Over the course of the last 3 months, Professor Mark O’Toole challenged both his Principles of Management and Principles of Marketing class to raise 10,000 dollars worth of donations for Mel Trotter Ministries.

The project was laid out such as this: Collect $10,000 of donations through material, monetary, or foundations from companies while in groups of 3-4 with 1 person as a team leader. The class used a list created by Professor O’Toole that gave totals for items such as dresses being $35 or hoodies being $30. The team leader was in charge of their team, holding responsibilities such as, setting up meetings, acting upon ideas to set up events, creating a budget, documenting all donations and actions on a spreadsheet and quite a few other smaller tasks that had to be kept up with. This led to a very successful situation for this class: no matter the role they part took in it was noticeable that everyone was taught a sense of how to step up and take action, how to keep track of data and information, and lastly this idea of how to make an impact as a small group of people.

Between the two classes, they were able to succeed with an extremely tremendous amount of donations to donate to Mel Trotter Ministries. Although the goal set for the classes was 10,000 dollars, there were plenty of groups that went above and beyond that goal. A lot of groups held totals around $20,000 and $30,000 of donations and there were also groups that reached nearly $40,000 and $80,000.

Through this these teams had to be extremely innovative and push outside their comfort zone to retrieve results. This led to some events on campus, things ran through Campus Ministry, or competitions such as a raffle or pie eating.

This led to a project that didn’t just teach values to students about how to reach a goal or how to work together in a business way, this project allowed for students on this campus to actually make a difference. Through being a small group using innovative ways to raise donations for those less fortunate.

Mel Trotters on pickup day, had to take two truck loads due to the success of these students, with one of the men stating that this is one of the biggest collections they have had!