The Man Who Does it All
UNF graduate’s greatest success is to help others succeed

Volunteering must come from the heart. Some people do a few hours. Some people dedicate months to it. Kristoffer Francisco completed over 3,780 hours of community service during his four years of college. He devoted 3,780 hours of his time to helping others and making a difference in their lives.

“The thing that makes us human is our ability to dream,” says Francisco, a recent graduate in marketing and management from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. In fact, Francisco is full of mottos that have helped him triumph.

His volunteering experiences began when seeing people in need hit close to home. Francisco was born to Filipino parents who moved here looking for adventure and opportunity. “My father came to the U.S. in 1971 with $4.75 and the shirt on his back,” Francisco says. “I grew up poor, and that influenced me a lot.

“When I saw people that were down and out, I saw my parents and myself in them,” Francisco says. “If I was down, I would definitely want someone to help me.”

The first organization he volunteered with was the Presidential Envoys, a group of students that represents UNF around the nation. Then, he served as an Assistant Chief Justice in Student Government, which gave him the opportunity to help various organizations on campus as well as off.

"Try new things as long as they don’t hurt you or other people,” Francisco says is another of his maxims. It is this mentality that led him to become chairman of the Filipino Student Association, an organization he knew nothing about. In less than one year and after many hours of hard work, he turned a small group of seven members into a campus-wide organization of 300. “The name 'Filipino Student Association' is kind of misleading,” he says. “Everybody is welcome. We have a very diverse membership.”

One of his proudest moments was his experience with Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE)—an organization of 1,700 colleges around the world that teaches free enterprise principles to communities in need. It was with this organization that Francisco learned another mantra: “In order to succeed, you must teach others the way to succeed.” Francisco taught people how to develop viable enterprises in order to become self-sufficient communities and benefit from capitalism.

Francisco also says to “do something that scares you at least once a week.” That is why he is deeply involved in various enterprise endeavors that leave him only about five hours of sleep a night. He is currently working with UNF alumni Don Poag with whom he runs an insurance company, a construction company, a retail store, and a travel agency. He still works with non-profit organizations and does business consulting on the side. In his “spare” time, he is a disc jockey and starting his own music production company—Point Blank Entertainment.

With all his goals and achievements, Francisco has already made a difference in people’s lives, and for him, that is only the beginning. “I feel like my greatest joy from volunteering has been empowering people,” he says. “Not only the people who I volunteer for but also the people I volunteer with. I want to make people feel like they can accomplish anything.”

Contact Francisco at 904-448-9777 or
FranciscoK@ioa-insurance.com

Copyright © 2006 Oxendine Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved