Morehouse College News May 14, 2015 Marketing Students Give to the Homeless Through Soleful Giving Many of the 6,700 Atlanta residents homeless, living in shelters or transitional housing go without some of the basic necessities of everyday life, such as shoes. This semester, marketing professor Rubina Malik decided to make it a teachable situation for her students. Following her teaching philosophy of relating classroom lessons to issues in the community, her students launched the Soleful Giving Initiative. "They were assigned the task of creating, marketing and managing a shoe-drive campaign that would collect shoes for the homeless and less fortunate around Atlanta," Malik said. Her students collected more than 500 pairs of shoes, which they will donate to Crossroads Community Ministries. That organization will distribute the shoes - which ranged from shoes for toddlers to dress shoes for women and men - to the homeless and needy. Using the branding and marketing techniques they learned in class, the students created an interactive website that assisted with campus donations, user testing surveys that furthered their understanding of their demographic, and social media marketing that spread awareness throughout the Atlanta University Center and other schools, including Georgia State University. Incentives were created through a rewards program that issued certificates thanking the individual for their donations. Malik said the lessons learned were as much about a man of Morehouse's obligation to be a servant leader as they were about marketing. "When I see a sparkle in my students' eyes, I know I have ignited a flame of passion within their hearts," she said. "I want to help them blaze paths of excellence through unchartered territories, not only for themselves, but as paragons for their peers and the community to look up to." SANDRA M. PHOENIX Executive Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 800-999-8558, ext. 4820 404-702-5854 Skype: sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree NW Suite 200 Atlanta,GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (LYRASIS) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.