Forget working at the mall, life-guarding or filing paperwork. For 30 Baltimore students, their summer job is about finding their entrepreneurial spirit.
And many of them believe that getting paid to craft a business plan is not a bad way to spend a summer.
"I wish this was a real job," said Tamia Jones, 17, a rising senior at Northwestern High School.
Jones and other classmates are becoming budding entrepreneurs through a new component of the city's summer employment program, which secured jobs for more than 6,500 students this year. Students in the entrepreneurship program are learning the ins and outs of running a business, networking, leadership skills and financial literacy. Like their counterparts in other jobs, they work 30 hours a week for six weeks, earning $6.55 an hour. The program ends Aug. 1.
After supporting the YouthWorks program for many years, Colgate-Palmolive selected Baltimore as one of two cities to participate in the company's youth entrepreneurship initiative. (Atlanta is the other.) Colgate and Stop, Shop and Save supermarket donated $30,000 to establish the summer workshop at Morgan State University. Along with the 30 YouthWorks students, more than a dozen other students signed up for the program and are paying tuition.
"It's really nice," said Raquel Suber, 15, a rising sophomore at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, which is part of the YouthWorks program. "When I first came, I said I'm coming to school for the summer, ugh. But we learned how to be the boss and do our own thing."
Advocates of entrepreneurship education - which has been on the rise across college campuses in recent years - are reaching children as young as kindergarten to instill characteristics such as teamwork and problem-solving skills, said Bonnae Meshulam, president of Junior Achievement of Central Maryland.
Natasha Cross, founder of Baltimore-based Engaging Youth Entrepreneurs (EYE) for Change, which is running the camp-like program, says entrepreneurship is not just about business ownership. It's about creating a can-do attitude among youths that encourages critical thinking, creativity and innovation.
"A lot of our young people have career aspirations to be criminal lawyers, doctors, and that's great," said Cross, 25, a Morgan State graduate. "Whatever young people want to do, we want to support them. We want to make sure they have an entrepreneurial attitude and mind-set. They know how to contribute to the bottom line of the company, they understand the inner workings of management when it comes to running a company, they know how to create new ideas and ways of doing things."
