Arturo Noriega, Centro's Founder and Executive Director (far right) with Digital Nest's first group of Centro's Basic Entrepreneurship Program graduates.
This summer, we worked with the inspiring team at Digital Nest to deliver the first Centro Basic Entrepreneurship & Financial Literacy Program to youth in Watsonville, CA! We spent eight intense sessions working on new businesses, surely reminding us of the thrust in young people when they are motivated and have the right tools and skills.
We thank Jacob Martínez, Digital Nest's Executive Director, for immediately coming on board and allowing us to reach together to their promising youth leaders through Centro's Business Planning App.
“We are passionate about the intersection of small business entrepreneurship, youth leadership and technology, particularly when it connects people with high potential with the resources and support they need to succeed.”
The summer workshop yielded three business plans for:
- Tech Mobile: An itinerant free wifi provider that offers free computer classes in rural communities.
- Scholarly: a crowd sourcing scholarship portal for minority college-bound students. This idea was short-listed as a potential project for Paypal's annual hackathon.
- And last but not least, an Entrepreneurship Institute for Digital Nest, so they can continue training more young entrepreneurs year-round!
We are extremely excited to have worked with such sharp, enthusiastic, creative, young socially-minded problem solvers who are focusing their energy on businesses that directly benefit their communities. Everyone learned a great deal about business planning, budgeting and prototyping, which was our main goal, but we were far more pleased to see how their families too rejoiced on these accomplishments at graduation.
We also want to thank Winnie Nguyen, Steve Bean and Yethzell Diaz from Digital Nest who helped us make this happen. This workshop couldn't have been possible without you. We look forward to doing more together!