OAN Entrepreneurship Program
Entrepreneurship education builds college and career readiness, strengthens 21st-century skills, is fun, and is a meaningful way to involve local businesses and community leaders. Learning about entrepreneurship and flexing their entrepreneurial muscles helps students develop grit, a growth mindset, curiosity, courage, and resourcefulness.
Scroll down to learn how Ohio’s out-of-school time programs employ entrepreneur education to inspire and connect children, youth, teens, and the adults who work with them.
Entrepreneurship Pathway to Workforce Readiness Toolkit!
The Ohio Afterschool Network and Young Entrepreneur Institute gathered resources from high-quality entrepreneurship education providers to create a strong and replicable curriculum. This enables educators to guide high school students to earn an OhioMeansJobs Readiness Seal while building an entrepreneurial mindset and skill set. Download the toolkit below.
Upcoming Entrepreneur Education PD Opportunities:
Young Entrepreneur Institute, OAN's partner in entrepreneurship education, holds free monthly Educator Power Hours on a variety of topics including fostering creativity, learning from failure, marketing, and more. Virtual Power Hour sessions are designed to help those who facilitate entrepreneur education strengthen their practice and learn about additional resources. Archived recordings of earlier sessions are available here.
Young Entrepreneur Institute also holds an annual conference, Enspire, with nationally recognized speakers on a number of topics including education, workforce development, creativity, entrepreneurship, communication, and more. Recordings of the 2020 Enspire sessions are available here, including acclaimed author and researcher Heather McGowan on the Future of Work and Kimberly Bearden on Teaching Soft Skills to Build the Entrepreneurial Mindset - both AWESOME sessions for anyone who works with youth.
We want to express a special THANK YOU to ECDI for their sponsorship of this Pitch Challenge!
Walking in Another’s Shoes
Sandy Valley Local Schools challenged third graders in their 21st Century Community Learning Center grant-funded afterschool program to research a problem, develop a solution, and pitch it. Students interviewed the school custodian about what he needed to do his job better and learned he needed a better way to store and organize his screwdrivers. They interviewed cafeteria staff and learned they needed a way to hold recipes while cooking. They interviewed the art teacher and learned she needed a better holder for drying and storing paint brushes. Students went to work: they shared their findings with the entire third-grade class and invited them to help research and design solutions. They reviewed suggestions, created CAD designs for the 3D printers in their maker space, and pitched them to the end users: the school custodian, cafeteria staff, and art teacher.
Elevated Visibility and New Partners
Youngstown’s Heart Reach Neighborhood Ministries added entrepreneurship education to their summer program. Students learn about entrepreneurship, develop a business idea and pitch it to community judges. In 2023, a Great Handshake competition was held. Students learned about, practiced, and competed to make the best first impression.
Project-Based Learning and Goat Breath Mints
Fourth and fifth graders in Newark City School’s Afterschool Adventures learned about goats, bees, and chickens in an entrepreneurship education program with an agriculture focus, offered with funding from Battelle and in partnership with Young Entrepreneur Institute, Ohio Soybean Council, and Young Entrepreneur Institute. They took field trips to farms, talked with farmers, met barnyard animals, and flexed their entrepreneurial mindsets when they came up with solutions to challenges they learned about…including Goat Breath Mints.
