Marshall students showcase Global Brigades projects

Marshall School of Business hosted their Annual Showcase in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center on Friday evening, with a special performance from the Playback Theatre at USC.

The goal of the event was to showcase the work that students had completed during their Global Brigades trip as they helped build sustainable communities in indigenous villages. The majority of the attendees were students who had been on brigades to either Panama or Honduras during winter and spring break, respectively.

The event started with a presentation by Playback Theatre at USC, a form of improvisational theater composed of an ensemble of actors.  The director asked the students who had traveled to Panama and Honduras to share their personal stories, focusing on their individual emotions. The actors then recreated the stories through music and dance.

After the performances, the groups that traveled to Panama talked about their experience teaching financial literacy to a local community.  Within the community were a group of five women who made jewelry and woven baskets from natural resources. The group explained that they had few resources to sell their products properly.

Marshall students helped the women understand the theories behind accounting and taught them basic systems so they could keep track of their sales inventory.  The students also taught the women in the community key English phrases so they could sell their products to tourists and. through group exercises, taught them how to make successful sales pitches.

Garrett Edwards, a sophomore majoring in business administration, was glad to see that his group had been able to make a difference in the community.

“Through Marshall, I learned that business is beyond profits — it’s also about building relationships,” he said. “This intersection between business and culture is really what made this a special experience.”

The Brigades group that traveled to Honduras explained that they had experienced a similar situation.  The community they were helping was in the process of setting up a local bank, but many of the locals had minimal knowledge about how to create a business.

USC students taught them about leadership, community development and social responsibility. The group also held workshops in which they taught the people about business essentials, including finance, interest rates and loans.

Students at the event shared their various experiences to attendees.

Kwan Hyung Kim, a freshman in the World Bachelor in Business program, said his group helped this community take initiative and be confident in doing their business.

“Most of the people there only have education to the sixth grade, so their financial literacy ability is not as far as we would have liked, so we try to help them in that aspect,” Kim said.

The group then shared what they had learned from their trip, which included recognizing the value in learning about other cultures.

Sabrina Wang, a junior majoring in accounting, went on the trip to Honduras and shared how it had changed her perspective about the world.

“It’s like having a new angle to look through,” she said. “For example, if we have a difficult presentation or a project, we will look back at this time, when we had no Wi-Fi, we had no professors or TAs, all we had was each other, our brains and our commitment and passion for this community.”

Kaiti Liu, a junior majoring in business administration, said that witnessing how people in these communities lived was eye-opening for her.

“Seeing the differences in our lives was huge for me,” she said. “I saw that these people are really capable and really smart; they just didn’t have the resources or the knowledge.”

Shashank Agrawal, a junior majoring in computer science and business administration, traveled to Panama with Marshall and went to the event to see what others had thought of the various trips.

“It’s really cool getting insights from both sides and see what they thought of [the trip].”

The event concluded with Global Brigades @ Marshall co-Presidents Kevin Chuang and Joy Xu thanking the Marshall School of Business for their support throughout the year.