Calvin News

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.