She Means Business encourages young entrepreneurs

By Jamie Swinnerton
Tompkins Weekly

 

Sometimes a kid’s lemonade stand is more than a lemonade stand, sometimes it’s an opportunity to inspire a future entrepreneur. Nowadays you can find a summer camp for nearly every activity or niche interest and here in Tompkins County, the She Means Business summer workshop at Alternative’s Federal Credit Union starting Aug. 6 was created to educate and inspire young girls who may or may not already have an interest in starting their own businesses.

Back in eighth grade, Beverly Wallenstein had her own entrepreneur summer camp experience that inspired her so much that she said it completely changed the direction of her life. After that experience, she knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur. So, when she grew up she took that passion and started Girls Mean Business, summer workshops, and programs for middle and high school-aged girls interested in exploring entrepreneurship. Eventually, she became connected with Kathleen Clark of Alternatives and the program was brought to the credit union.
“I just became aware of them and was very interested,” Clark said. “What I do here, my focus is on small business development and the fact that she was doing it specifically for teenage girls just felt like such a fit, and something we would be interested in.”

Wallenstein brought the program, Alternatives brought a new larger community to connect with and more resources to grow the program. The partnership was a success.

“It was just the perfect partnership,” Wallerstein said. “Alternatives is focused on the people that I was focused on as well,” Wallerstein said. “People that weren’t really aware, necessarily, that what they were doing was entrepreneurship. Girls who were doing lemonade stands or making jewelry and they could turn those hobbies into something that they could make money off on and really see a viable career option out of what they were doing.”

 

The first camp after the partnership was made was hosted the summer of 2017 and was a huge success with nine participants. Before working with Alternatives, Wallerstein had been running the program at Cornell University and found that a lot of her participants already had the knowledge of how to turn a hobby into a business. It wasn’t the audience she wanted to reach.
Alternative’s mission in the community, Clark said, is to help serve the underserved. While the credit union already had a business development program in-house, and a youth financial education program in-house, combining both with Girls Mean Business created the “perfect partnership” Clark said.

“We can inspire these young girls,” Clark said. “Give them something else to think about, as she got to experience at a young age. Think about themselves being the ones in charge, running the business, making the decisions.”

Some of last year’s participants were already running their own businesses by turning their hobbies into money-making ventures. Others had little to no experience with entrepreneurship. Over the five days that the workshop lasts the girls developed their own business plans, pitched them to a panel of “investors” and met with other local female entrepreneurs and business leaders who told the girls their own stories of creating a business.

All of the girls were nervous about giving their pitches, but Clark said it was clear to see that they had grown over the last five days.

The first day of camp is all about deciding what kind of business the girls want to focus on. Over the next few days, these ideas are built on and the many aspects and steps of creating a business are explored.

“Taking them through really identifying their product, identifying who their target market is, how much does it cost you to make this product or service, how are we going to scale this to turn it into an actual business,” Clark said. “We’ll have our business loan officer come in and talk to them about financing a business, startup costs, all that sort of thing.”

This year’s workshop will be slightly different than last year based on feedback from the 2017 participants. Some of the exercises will be different, but the format will stay basically the same.
“They all really, really enjoyed it,” Wallerstein said of last year’s workshop participants. “I think one of the main feedback that we got from them was the ‘We want a longer experience.’ So that was kind of fun to hear.”

With the help of the Alternative’s fundraising team, the workshop is being offered completely free to 12 girls. Supplies, lunch, and t-shirts will all be provided for free this year. They don’t want there to be any financial barrier to participating.

Expected speakers this year include Samantha Abrams, co-founder of Emmy’s Organics; Kate Conroy, from the Rhine House; Sarah Gotowka, from Earth Grown Shades and Luna Fiber Studio in Trumansburg; and Jamie Love of Jamie Love Photography who is going to take professional photos of the girls.