Instead of making Shark Tank-esque pitches to professors or inventing a new business, the business honors program at the University of South Florida asks students to complete a community service project.
A cohort from the class of 2025 decided to make an impact by keeping things local.
“This campus (in St. Petersburg), especially, is heavily geared toward the environment and marine science,” Thomas Mezgebu, head of communications for the group, said. “Obviously there are big concerns like climate change or rising sea levels, and those big, daunting issues kind of give people a hopeless feeling. That’s something big that we right now have trouble to tackle, so we started with the community level.”
To incorporate the campus’ devotion to the environment, the group brainstormed possible projects until they came upon Sawgrass Lake Park.
“Let’s do something to interact with wildlife and habitat destruction and pollution,” Mezgebu said. “Let’s counteract that.”
Last month, the group partnered with Keep Pinellas Beautiful to host a public cleanup at the park. They are also holding a fundraiser for the Tampa Bay Estuary Program. According to Mezgebu, every five pounds of refuse collected equates to $5 for the Estuary. The cohort collected 8.27 pounds of trash during the cleanup and is accepting donations.
“Moving forward, our hope is to expand this initiative to encompass more students and organize more cleanup events that gradually have a larger impact,” Mezgebu said.
Mezgebu was so inspired by the cleanup that on Saturday, Nov. 14, he pitched Green Dream, at an “entrepreneurship open-mic pitch.” His idea is an effort to move the project past community service into a student organization focused on helping the environment.
“We hope that in the following years, and semesters, we can bring more of the community impact into it and make this a recurring annual, semi-annual thing, where the whole community could come in,” Mezgebu said. “It could be a safer, cleaner environment, not just for the animals, but for the kids to play in and stuff like that.”
The group is compiling a video complete with pictures, videos and content related to the project in order to catalog the experience and determine what needs to be enhanced and what needs to be altered for the next cleanup.
For more info or to make a contribution, email Thomas Mezgebu at [email protected].
