TeachingKidsBusiness.com Community Involvement

Markham Sunrise Rotary Club

Speech

November 07, 2001

Good morning and thank you for inviting me to talk with you this morning. My topic today is something that I am very interested in and could talk for hours on, but we are restricted to 15 to 20 minutes, therefore I have controlled my content with a scripted presentation.

TeachingKidsBusiness.com is an Internet site that is developing and distributing programming for kids to engage and inspire them to develop business & life skills, explore career choices, gain work related experience and prepare for careers from the age of 8 to 18. The site is all about kids beginning to understand their talents and interests and finding ways to further develop and apply themselves.

I think a good way to introduce you to TeachingKidsBusiness.com is to have you think back to when you were a kid. I know it is early in the morning but I would like to ask you to think back to when you were under 18 and if your memory is better then mine back even further.

When did you start preparing for your career?
Did you have lots of questions about what you should be?
Who and what influenced your career choice?
Did you make the right career choice?
What was the first job experience you had?
Was it a paper route, cutting grass, baby-sitting, shoveling snow or a lemonade stand?
Would you have liked to gain other experience?
Did experience help shape you into the person you are today?
How, when and from who did you learn about business?
When did you learn business skills?
How did you learn business skills?
Name a number of business skills that you regularly use.

I suspect that you now have answers to many of these questions. Many of you have learned the hard way, made business mistakes and made several career changes. This trend will continue and is a trend we can all comfortably predict even in these uncertain times.

I suspect that most of you feel that kids in our communities have many of the same questions and concerns that we had. Kids still need help, even in our information age where there is much more access to information about business and careers. The information is there, but do kids have the encouragement and guidance?

Of all the things that kids are exposed to, do they spend much time on developing businesses and careers. Do kids understand what careers would best suit their inherent skills? Ironically what kids will do for a living is one of the most time consuming things that they will spend their future on but one of things they spend the least amount of time preparing for it. What would happen if we took 5% to 10% of the 20 hours a week that kids spend watching TV, playing video games or internet surfing and apply it to some sort of career awareness and preparation.

As adults and community minded people we are now in a position to provide information or answers to kids and help kids find their way into business. I am not suggesting that kids from 8 to 18 should know what they will do in business or career wise at an early age. However, I do believe that their chances of succeeding will be greatly enhanced if we help them to start thinking, understanding and exploring business and careers at an early age.

This will also provide benefits to their daily lives and future goals, as business and life skills are becoming interchangeable. There are many positive influences from business training that can help kids. I even suggest that we could combat a number of today’s social problems with more of this type of programming and influence on kids.

Why wait until university or later to think about, prepare and develop a career or business?
Sports careers start at a very early age. Tiger Woods is an extreme case of starting early. His story is well known and is influencing a new generation of athletes and parents. There are cases of business people who discovered their passion early and focused their efforts to succeed. Unfortunately, kids don’t here about these stories.

Why don’t we view business preparation a little more proactively while keeping it game-like and kid-friendly?

This came to mind when I noticed a recent TV commercial in which a man was teaching tennis in away that we would believe that he was coaching a very competitive player. Once they show the player we realize that it is a young child that is having difficulty making contact with the tennis ball. It would be great to see the enthusiasm and patience he showed his child in the area of career preparation.

I have devised a strategy for TeachingKidsBusiness.com that engages kids in learning and preparing for business and careers, providing tools and experiences that will assist kids and engage community members such as yourself to participate in this youth development and community enhancement initiative.

There are many aspects of TeachingKidsBusiness.com which are found in our four pillars or sections to the website.

The first section is our Resource Center, which provides kids with tools to help them develop business and general life skills. The thinking behind tools is that kids can relate to the use of tools to build something. In this case they will be building their careers. There are a number of sources for these tools, which include books on personal development strategies or self-help, corporate training programs, games and many consultant strategies.

It is interesting to look at professional training programs used by companies and examine how they can be used with kids. For example, time management, recommendation writing, leadership, decision-making, team building, thinking etc. There are even “kid-developed” tools like improvisation, used to train adults in companies. I have taken many such tools and adapted them for kids with the goal of introducing concepts, applying them to kids’ lives and creating activities to reinforce the concept.

I have even had a number of adults enjoy this area and found it to be an excellent resource.

The second section is Business Encounters with the goal to create “experience opportunities“ for kids. As first time job experience is important for kids, we have developed some programs to help in this area. This has been accomplished through programs such as a golf caddie program, business case projects (kids interview and profile a business), a business game (kids develop a digital product and set-up a business) and youth involvement in business related partnership programs. The essence of this section is to provide kids with ideas, projects, responsibilities and support to take the initiative to gain experience.

The third section is Community Involvement. I have spent a lot of time working with my children’s school on business partnerships. My first hand experience and ideas on better leveraging the business and general community members have inspired this section of TeachingKidsBusiness.com. I encourage community members to share their business experiences with kids, contribute programming or help distribute our programming. I have identified a number of specific community groups and ideas to initiate involvement.

Some Examples of the ways community involvement has assisted in this initiative are:

Our business community has provided career profiles in our E-Mentoring Program For Kids. This program allows kids to view a variety of career choices.
The Caddie Program was developed with input from many golf associations across the U.S.A. This is an extensive program that provides a caddie training manual, caddie opportunity ideas, a letter to help kids present themselves to golf courses and advice from golfers.
Cartoonists assisted in the development of a resource center tool called “Doodle Away to Ideas.“ This is a tool to help in idea generation and a relaxation strategy.
Character Building was inspired from an initiative in Markham.
“Put Your Thinking Hat On“ helps kids expand their thinking process and was inspired from a book written by Edward de Bono.

The fourth section is the Info Center, which was developed to explain background, more general strategy and corporate information. It was brought to my attention, from a gentleman with BBBS in New York , that it was critical for people to understand who is behind and what are the motives behind organizations that communicate with children. I have taken this very seriously and consequently have developed appropriate information and strategies to address these concerns.

Hopefully you have a feel of what TeachingKidsBusiness.com is all about. There are a lot of details within each of the four sections that I could elaborate on, but I will only mention a few more specifics that are applicable to your group:

I will evolve the website by explaining business strategy to kids to help them understand about business through the development of TeachingKidsBusiness.com or as a case study approach.
I hope to evolve the website to engage kids to participate in the development of the site and have kids help other kids through their involvement in our programs.
We are developing the concept of “youth empowerment“ to elevate the involvement of kids in TeachingKidsBusiness.com and to create a respectful working relationship and meaningful involvement.
A key strategy to this website is that the programming is free to kids. The content is made available to many kids that don’t have Internet access through youth service organizations and other community members.

I think that there are a number of opportunities for Rotary Club at the local level and internationally to help in this initiative.

We have created an “e-Mentoring Program for Kids“ that engages business people to answer questions relating to their careers and advice on careers. The responses by business people are presented to kids in a database on the website so that kids can view a variety of career opportunities. The program is unique in that the career profiles are very personal, kid-friendly and full of advice. Rotarians would be excellent e-mentors. Internationally, Rotarians could show a variety of career choices, valuable advice and positive influences.
There is a networking opportunity to invite your business associates to share a little of their time and experience in the many opportunities we have created. (e-Mentoring Program and business case studies) This is a very effective way of impacting kids as the information your associates share with the website can be accessed by many kids and youth service groups.
The Rotary International World Wide Service Program would be an excellent Rotary project to communicate this program and attract e-Mentors internationally. This would be a unique no cost program.

In closing, I invite you to participate and enhance this initiative. Over the past year the website has grown to approximately 500 files of content and is well positioned to continue to grow, provide quality content to kids an impact kids in a very positive and lasting way.

If you would like to contact me you can go to www.teachingkidsbusiness.com, click on the enter button and click on the “Contact Us“ button on the bottom of the home page. My e-mail address is info@teachingkidsbusiness.com.

You can also enter our Youth Service Group Programs section and click on Rotary International which is proposal that links opportunities throughout the website. Today’s speech is also available in this section.

Thank you again for having me and I would be happy to answer any questions.

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