Re-engaging Youth Entrepreneurship

In January 2021 the Foundation convened a committee of associates drawn from three programme areas that rarely sit at the same table: education, entrepreneurship, and Kansas City civic. Each brought a different set of grantees, a different definition of success, and a different instinct about what re-entry should look like.

They were given one question to hold for six months.

My job was the connective tissue: information gathering and facilitation. Find what already exists locally and nationally, put it in front of the committee in a form they can argue with, run the sessions where they argue, and then write the thing leadership actually decides from.

Held narrowly, youth entrepreneurship means teenagers starting companies. That reading makes the field tiny, because very few teenagers start companies and very few should. It also quietly excludes a large number of organisations already doing the work under other names. The Aspen Institute found roughly a quarter of youth-serving programmes are building entrepreneurial skills without using the word at all.

Held broadly, as identifying a problem worth solving and mobilising resources to solve it, the same investment reaches library maker spaces, after-school programmes, robotics teams and Girl Scouts.

Widening the definition was the first recommendation, and it is the one that changes the size of everything downstream.

The landscape work sorted every programme in the metro into three types. Exposure events are one-off, a competition or a challenge day. Episodic programming sits inside a trusted organisation that does something else most of the year. Intentional pathways run for years, usually with a school district behind them.

Sorting them that way made the gap visible immediately. The deepest programmes are the ones tied to district funding, which means the best-resourced districts have them and the least-resourced districts do not. An access problem, wearing a programme-quality costume.

The plan was straightforward. Summarise the eight pitches, hand the set back to the group, and have them vote.

Writing the summaries is what killed the vote. Laid side by side, the pitches were not eight competing strategies. They were one strategy with eight different emphases. Everybody wanted to start with the schools work already in motion, everybody wanted to learn from national players, and everybody thought the effort had to reach past the school day.

A vote at that point would have manufactured a loser out of a consensus, and then spent the rest of the year defending a margin that never existed.

The replacement exercise had three lists. Direction collected the shared spine, which is what leadership needed to hear as a single recommendation. Unique aspects preserved the ideas only one person had, so consensus did not quietly delete the sharpest thinking in the room. Risks was written by the same people who wrote the pitches, which is the only version of a risk register anybody believes.

Then the group ranked those, rather than ranking each other.

The shape of that first year is the consensus made operational. A summit rather than a grant round, because the committee’s own risk list said the loudest danger was signalling money before understanding the field, and setting off a year of phone calls the Foundation could not answer.

The recommendation was also deliberately anchored to something already running. Real World Learning had entrepreneurial experiences established as a recognised credential in metro high schools. Starting there meant re-entry without announcing re-entry.

Running the agenda is the easy half. The valuable half is being close enough to the material to see, mid-exercise, that the instrument you brought is about to produce a worse answer than the room already has.

Nobody would have complained about the vote. It was on the plan, it would have produced a ranked list, and the list would have looked like a result. It just would not have been true.