Communities across North Carolina are successfully incorporating youth entrepreneurship into their economic development strategies. Community organizations and educators are partnering to offer youth entrepreneurship camps that build entrepreneurial skills in youth. This article shows examples of how communities are recognizing the importance of youth involvement in economic development.

Many youth between the ages of 9 and 18 attend youth entrepreneurship camps across North Carolina. A variety of camp activities include hearing from local entrepreneurs, taking part in hands-on activities to learn about their community, assessing their own skills, and creating a business idea. During the camp, youth complete activities that build creativity, teamwork, leadership, and financial literacy skills.

A remarkable trait of many camps is the partnering that takes place across the community to make the camps a reality. Several community partnerships include Community Colleges, Public Schools, local 4-H Cooperative Extension, and local Boys and Girls Clubs. Many camps are held on Community College campuses to help expose youth to the college environment.

From the very beginning, camp participants are encouraged to “think like an entrepreneur” by being creative and taking risks. The business teams are encouraged to think about what their community needs, what they do well, and what interests them. The teams quickly become competitive about who has the most creative and sometimes most outrageous business ideas. Unfailingly, the adults who serve as judges for the final presentations are impressed by the creativity of the ideas, the quality of the presentations, and the engagement of the students. Read the rest of this entry »

As the local Kibera Slum, Nairobi, Kenya’s largest slum is re-vitalized as part of a herculean effort and creates its own wind and small business environment it will be time to push for strong economic development. Once economic plan is initiated it must be maintained.

The goal is to have income and money coming into the area to remain in circulation in the slum. How will money come in? Monies will come in from those who have jobs outside the slum in factories, as cooks, maids and civil workers. Also since slum tourism is high, reporters will wish to report on the progress of the upgraded slums and the controversies surrounding the bulldozing. Dignitaries, philanthropists and government officials will wish to parade around, visit and take credit for the incredible recovery to economic viability.

In addition to the local small enterprises and businesses which are near the town-centers that are created, there will also need to be “mobile businesses” such as cleaners, sales carts and other incidental types of businesses. As more money is flowing in the area the 800,000 population will continue to support them. Mobile Cart businesses will be very simplistic and each cart provides yet one more job.

These carts can be built for as water cleaning carts, food storage carts, dry good carts and the cost to build them will be anywhere from $65.00 to $450.00 where the higher costs will be for carts with pressure washers and water tanks. These carts can be equipped with RFID Active tags for tracking so that an entrepreneur who wishes to rent them out by the day as independent contractor units can do so safely. This will be an integral part of the small business economic long-term development plan. Their base location could be a Cargo Container with the goods inside. Read the rest of this entry »

Not long ago, I noted that our local economic development association was doing very little in the way of recruiting new businesses to our area. They had worked hard to get an enterprise zone in place, as well as a Foreign Trade Zone to attract businesses. Yet, they did nothing to encourage or actively recruit, there was not economic development recruiting team, only nice beautiful brochures that had been printed.

Then, a couple of people tried to recruit me to helping use my expertise to recruit business to the area. Unfortunately, after doing more research, I thought to myself; Am I quite positive that we are actually helping those folks we call upon? I mean I am wondering why anyone would bother to build a business here. One type of industry on the list to be recruited was light manufacturing.

Light manufacturing doesn’t make sense, and we really do not have a skilled workforce or college degreed folks except for a few industries, and those industries need more people, not more companies; (health care for instance). Supply is more or less equal to demand, and quality labor supply is the issue there.

I guess what I am getting at is; I, myself do not see the point in starting a business here, and if given the choice, I probably wouldn’t pick this area over another city, in a completely different state. It’s a great place to live, but it’s hostile to business. And the Enterprise Zone is outside of my own city limits, most is either developed with lots of empty space or totally undeveloped. Anything developed will compete against existing adjacent space on this side of the freeway that does not have the Enterprise Zone advantage.

Additionally, all of a near bye city, which has a crime problem and low-income-level population is an Enterprise Zone, but, personally, I do not wish to focus on those areas, nor would I recommend a company move into those areas, the labor is problematic, uneducated, dishonest, often with drug issues and it really looks like a little Mexico.

Adding more companies there, does not solve problems for our future in the Valley, adding more retail only allows the money to leave local circulation quicker. With the Enterprise Zone competing against the nicer areas of my own city and our higher-end office space, it’s a difficult job to recruit to my city. Read the rest of this entry »