Giving Compass' Take:

• Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship aims to advance youth success by teaching them important entrepreneurial skills within schools to get them immediately in that mindset. 

• How will learning about entrepreneurship at an early age provide kids with a growth mindset toward success? 

• Read about the World of Work program that starts teaching career-focused skills to students in Kindergarten. 

The access and opportunities that help many of us get ahead in life are not equally available to those living in under-resourced communities. Structural racial, ethnic, gender, and economic inequities in these communities often stand in the way of the dream of business ownership, and the independence and self-reliance that can come with being entrepreneurial.

For the past eight years, I have worked for the NFTE (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship). Our founder, Steve Mariotti, started the organization with the belief that activating the entrepreneurial mindset in young people in the Bronx and Brooklyn schools where he taught would positively affect their lives and communities. He recognized similarities between entrepreneurs and the street smarts and skills his students demonstrated every day, including independence, assertiveness, comfort with taking risks, and natural salesmanship. These traits helped the students navigate challenging circumstances, and when further developed and properly focused, could set young people on new paths to success by starting a business, being the entrepreneurial employee who reinvents an existing company, or working to solve a social problem.

We have seen the impact in the young people we serve. In surveys, 86 percent of NFTE alumni report being either employed or pursuing further education; 80 percent are in college or have graduated; 25 percent have started at least one business; and alumni earn 50 percent more than their peers on average.

All of us can play a role in putting young people on that path to success. Schools can adopt NFTE’s Entrepreneurship Pathway programs to ignite the entrepreneurial mindset in young people.

Read the full article by Dan Delany about youth success from Stanford Social Innovation Review