creating entrepreneurial opportunities.

Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities is a year-long course designed to utilize partnerships that provide an overview of business development and processes. Our local business community partners with area schools to create project-based experiences for students by providing funding, expertise, meeting space, business tours, and one-on-one mentoring. Students visit area businesses, learn from guest speakers, participate in a class business, write business plans, and start and operate their own businesses. Business concepts learned through the experiential CEO class are critical; the 21st century skills of problem-solving, teamwork, self-motivation, responsibility, higher-order thinking, communication, and inquiry are at the heart of a student's development throughout the course.

Every student who completes CEO leaves with something most people spend years trying to build: real experience. Not simulated, not hypothetical. The kind that comes from actually starting something and seeing it through. Local business owners fund the program, host it, speak in it, and mentor the students inside it. That investment pays directly back into the community through the next generation of workforce, leadership, and economic growth.