Calvin Prof Earns Honor

February 2, 2004 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Calvin College business professor Steve VanderVeen's commitment to emergent
business owners has earned him a 2003 Faculty/Staff Community Service-Learning
Award from Michigan Campus Compact.

VanderVeen's work targeted Grand Rapids' Burton Heights neighborhood, where,
due to a 10-year demographic shift, many new businesses belong to Hispanic
owners.

Jeff Bouman, the director of Calvin's service learning center nominated
VanderVeen for the award.

He says VanderVeen "made the rounds" in Burton Heights, working to get these
new business owners integrated into the established business community.

"Steve has been an excellent listener to the business owners who are sort of
disenfranchised," says Carol Rienstra, Calvin's director of community
relations. "He wanted to bring their stories out and share their stories with
the community."

Since 2000, at the Los Amigos Mexican Market, the Igris Beauty Salon, La Loma
Restaurant, the Burton Meat Farm and several other new ventures, VanderVeen and
students from his small business management and advanced marketing classes have
helped owners with their business and marketing plans.

The outreach project was part of Calvin@Burton Heights, Calvin's many-pronged
effort - funded by a HUD Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) grant -
to forge meaningful relationships with the Burton Heights community.

The neighborhood presented special challenges for the professor, his students
and the businesses they worked with. One was the cultural barrier.

"It's hard to work with people that you don't know to begin with," says
VanderVeen, "and when you start to work with people who live in a different
culture . . . it's hard to get beyond those shallow relationships."

Another challenge was the turnover in the Burton Heights community as both
residents and businesses come and go. of 12 businesses with which Calvin
worked there were significant changes at four of them in a one-year period.

Despite these obstacles, VanderVeen also helped a local Latino business
organization hold workshops and a Latino business expo and co-authored, with
Calvin's Deyni Ventura, a book in English and Spanish, Heroes in Burton
Heights, which spotlighted the twelve Hispanic entrepreneurs he worked with.

And, he says, "we probably learned more from them than what they learned from
us. We've been exposed to a whole different world, a different culture and a
different way of doing business."

VanderVeen, a 1982 Calvin graduate and former stockbroker with a Ph.D. in
marketing from the University of Illinois-Chicago, has taught at his alma mater
for 15 years.

The Burton Heights experience has transformed VanderVeen's approach Bouman
believes.

"What I've seen in Steve is a personal renaissance," he says, "a freshness in
his teaching, spurred by the recognition of the importance of experience in
education. That's basically the underlying value of service learning to the
college. The reason we exist is we have decided that the student also learns by
touching and engaging with the community."

Campus Compact annually recognizes one person on every member college and
university campus who exemplifies the service learning mission.

VanderVeen will accept his award the eighth annual Institute on
Service-Learning, held at 4:30 p.m. on February 5 at Grand Valley State
University's Kirkhof Center. Last year's winner at Calvin was former education
professor and current president of Trinity Christian College Steve Timmermans.

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Received on Mon Feb 2 14:37:28 2004