When Memorial’s Enactus team took the world stage in 2008, they brought home a title that would put them on the map in Canada and beyond.

Enactus Memorial is more than a competition group. It’s a student-run volunteer organization that launches community projects aiming to improve people’s lives through entrepreneurial thinking.

Enactus Memorial has won the Canadian national championship 10 times and the World Cup twice.

They are the most decorated Enactus team in Canadian history.

Their success wasn’t a product of happenstance or luck. It was leadership. And a big part of that leadership belongs to Lynn Morrissey, faculty advisor and communications professor in the business faculty at Memorial University, who has helped shape Enactus Memorial into one of the most successful student enterprises in the country.

Prof. Morrissey earned both her bachelor of commerce (co-operative) honours degree and her master’s degree in business administration from Memorial. She’s been teaching with the faculty since 1986.

She has stood alongside Enactus Memorial for more than a decade, and her work is rooted in helping turn student ideas into real, life-changing projects. She’s the faculty touchstone, advising on strategy, helping to build sustainable models and ensuring that student energy translates into triumph.

One of her team’s signature projects is Project Sucseed, a hydroponics system launched in late 2015 to tackle food insecurity in Northern and rural Newfoundland and Labrador.

Under her supervision, Project Sucseed grew quickly. From a handful of units in its first year to hundreds sold the next, the venture expanded into multiple communities, classrooms, co-ops and even soup kitchens. The project not only supplies produce but also teaches students about sustainable growing techniques, business, responsibility and local self-reliance.

 

Lynn Morrissey (centre) and the Enactus Memorial team, runners up in the 2017 World Enactus Cup. Photo from Memorial University Archives.

 

Another of her contributions is Prince’s Operation Entrepreneur (POE), a bootcamp Enactus Memorial runs to help current and former Canadian Armed Forces members build entrepreneurship skills as they transition back into civilian life.

Prof. Morrissey has helped shepherd the program, advising students and organizing partnerships with local entrepreneurs, businesses and sponsors. And at the very heart of POE is community: students helping students, businesses opening doors and the university stepping up with support.

Her role involves far more than advising competition work. She is cultivating a learning culture. She has pushed experiential learning beyond the theoretical.

In an op-ed written for the Gazette, titled “Good Trumps Gain,” she writes about how young people in Enactus care deeply not for personal gain, but for doing good and how that shapes their goals, their willingness to take risks and their commitment.

And her dedication to her students and their success has not gone unnoticed. In 2012, Prof. Morrissey received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

In confronting issues like food insecurity, youth unemployment, sustainable farming and reintegration of service members, her work with Enactus Memorial reflects a powerful idea: that universities are not islands unto themselves. They are engines that empower change in their communities.

Her impact isn’t just in awards or titles. It’s in the students who leave Enactus not only with a prize, but with confidence, with business sense and with the belief that they can create positive change.

She has helped build one of the country’s best Enactus teams, elevated community-engaged entrepreneurial projects and reinforced the idea that student learning can be both practical and purpose-driven.

In doing so, she has strengthened Memorial’s reputation as a place where students not only learn, but lead. A place where doing good means doing well.