In late October I was asked by a business acquaintance, Gemma Gowling, to help deliver a Grade 7 Junior Achievement program at the kids’ former school, Barriere Elementary.

Junior Achievmenet is an international non-profit organization that promotes business among youth.  There is a grade 5/6 program as well as a high school program (which I’m also assisting with in December).  But it’s the Grade 7 program, Business Basics, that I’ve volunteered to lead.  The school was very gracious and allowed me to bring Katie and her friend Christine, to participate as well.

It’s been an elightening excercise for me.  I’m learning all about 12-year-old attention spans.  I’ve discovered that you really have to have interesting things to say or do to engage them.  I’ve completed four once-a-week sessions and after the first one, I used the manual only as a guideline, and started to formulate my own delivery.

It’s also been an eye-opener as to how my perspective on business has changed.  With my opening awareness to global environmental issues, the necessity of making a living, and the importance of free enterprise within this framework, I’ve learned that I’m not sophisticated enough to know how capitalism can really work within environmental restrictions.  I’ve come to no resolution in the short month I’ve been delivering this program, but it does raise the question that perhaps we need to be thinking a lot more about how we present business processes to kids.

It was certainly not my mandate to preach environmentalism to the Grade 7 class.  Far from it. However, I was quite delighted that the direction I received from Gemma, the regional coordinator, was to keep the selection of a business idea simple.  It turns out that simple, usually means a recycling project.

Business Basics essentially teaches youth about how busienss are set up, why they exist, how they exist, how to sell things (or services), how to keep track of expenses and revenue and how to evaluate success. To do this, I’m helping the Grade 7 class with setting up a Sales Stand, or a business that they start to make money.  Junior Achievment recommends that the proceeds from a successful business venture be split between charity, a Grade 7 goal, or other school related need.  I liked that this organization recognized the importance of charity.

The class’s teacher, Miss M. and I compiled a short-ish list of possible business ideas, including a used book sale, used CD/DVD sale, a garage sale, or a holiday recipe book. Each of these ideas emphasizes keeping initial investment low (since 12-year-olds don’t have investment accounts).  I loved that simple meant it was environmentally sensitive!  We allowed the kids to choose other ideas as well.  In the end they chose to make handmade crafts to sell to guests at their Christmas concert in mid-December.

My job was to walk them through pricing the materials, setting a selling price, marketing their store, promoting their sale and making sure they set up their business area so that they could effectively sell their home made crafts.

It’s been fun.  After the first session -which I found dry to deliver and, if the yawning was any indication, dry to receive-I bumped up the activity level in Session Two when we talked about marketing.  I spent some time with Stephen and Helen tracking down corporate logos for the class to identify.  I know I had a lot of fun finding them, and it was a lot of fun to see what the kids could recognize.  I was amazed that one boy immediately recognized the Ferrari logo. Nobody identified the David Suzuki Foundation (hear that, David Suzuki Foundation???) or the Versace logo.  I included lots of the name brand clothing companies to make some easy – here’s where Stephen’s input came in handy!  I pointed out that a drawing, a swoosh (Nike) or just a green deer can immediately summon recognition and an instant emotional reaction.  (Oh how I wish the David Suzuki Foundation logo was as immediately recognized as Hurly Clothes!)

Today we started to figure out the costs of each item the class chose to make.  There was a collective intake of breath when we discovered that to make 30 dream catchers, we might need $150 in materials!  That was out of reach of the class, and I suspect not an amount that Insight Tire and Auto (the local company that has indicated it would sponsor the class project) would pony up, either.  They did like the $300 in revenue ($150) in profit they would make if they could sell them at $10.  This week they are going to see if they can reduce the cost of producing the dream catchers.

Miss M, through her mother, was given a whole schmoo of leftover craft materials when another lady left Kamloops for good. This included about 30 Angel forms and the material to make them.  How exciting it was to put down a big fat $0.00 for cost of materials for this particular item.  I hope that the class recognized that they were also providing a huge recycling/reusing effort by using unwanted items.

The class will be selling dream catchers, home made holiday cards, and angels of all kinds at the Barriere Elementary School on December 16th. They are still working out details, but if you would like to support budding entrepreneurs and, perhaps budding recyclers, please come and see the performance and buy a few lovingly made crafts. 

The class has indicated they want any profit to possibly be split between the Grade 7 Field Trip at the end of the school year and the Adopt a Village program they’ve enrolled in recently.  If you have more questions, call the school at 250-672-9916 AFTER December 1st (this is the class deadline for finalizing details).  Or, alternatively, you can reach me through this site.