Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with a group of enterprising young men and women at the 2010 Educate, Lead, Inspire Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs (ELITE) Youth Entrepreneurship Camp. The program is the brainchild of several women who have shown a longstanding commitment to advancing entrepreneurship in Southern Illinois.
Donna Raynalds is executive director of Southern Illinois Delta Empowerment Zone (SIDEZ), Norma Turok is a business educator and former member of the University of Illinois Extension office in Carbondale, and Candy Eastwood oversees the Illinois Small Business Development Center at Shawnee Community College.
The weeklong training camp helped students gain a greater knowledge of their own business personalities and understand the basics of business planning, while meeting successful entrepreneurs. Despite the obvious attractiveness of small business for our young people (money), there are other reasons to support youth entrepreneurship.
Benefits for our youth
In my 16-year involvement in youth entrepreneurship, I have noticed the following long-term benefits. Some of the great inventions of our day have come from progressive thinkers whose dreams materialized once they took the leap of faith. Entrepreneurship allows young people to envision a future they may not have thought possible. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grew out of the couple's success at Microsoft, and it has allowed them to not only change lives in communities around Redmond, Wash., but also in communities throughout the world. Entrepreneurship allows successful young people a greater opportunity to contribute to the revitalization of their communities. Lastly, entrepreneurship provides young people with alternatives to unemployment, low-paying jobs and destructive life choices.
They're perfect for it
Take a close look at some of the world's top entrepreneurs and you will find that today's young people have a lot of the same characteristics. Spend more than a couple of minutes with our young people and you will see that they are overflowing with creativity. What these young creative minds dream up is their reality. Young people are often brimming with confidence and believe that they can do anything because they have yet to be limited by our adult constraints. Today's youth also have amazing vision and can tell you (in detail) all about their goals, aspirations and what they believe their futures will look like - all of this while many of us might be trying to figure out what we will be doing next week.
Creating a different future
I often wonder how different things would be if Bill Gates Sr. had discouraged his technology-driven son when he and friends started their first company, Traf-O-Data (a first attempt at writing software for computer hardware). Teaching our young people about entrepreneurship represents the gift that keeps on giving and will provide them with a skill that they can use for a lifetime. Chinese philosopher Confucius said, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime." Now is the time to support youth entrepreneurship because the latent talents of today could pay big business dividends for the region in the future.
CAVANAUGH L. GRAY is director of business development for The Entrepreneur Café, L.L.C. in Carbondale. He can be contacted at cgray@ecafell.com or 618-206-7013. For more information on how you or your organization can get involved with youth entrepreneurship or for ideas on how to start, grow and succeed in small business, be sure to follow The Entrepreneur Café, L.L.C. on Twitter, www.twitter.com/TheECafe, or at www.ecafellc.com.
8/01/2010
Youth entrepreneurship is alive and well in Southern Illinois
via thesouthern.com
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