Project develops taste, skills for entrepreneurship among rural youth so they might stay or return

"Amid predictions of continuing migration from Appalachia by its young people, a new educational program is teaching elementary and middle school students in Appalachian Kentucky the entrepreneurial skills that can prepare them for a future in the region, creating jobs for themselves and others," reports Jon Hale of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The E-Discovery Challenge includes instruction in economics, mathematics and other essential business skills, but they say their biggest lesson was the value of working together and trading ideas with others as they used small seed grants to develop a product and offer it for sale. “I learned you have to trust your teammates and work with them to do the job,” Morgan County student Josh Adkins, whose team made T-shirts, told Hale, a native of the region.

Another middle-school student, Devon Middleton of Elliott County (at right in photo, with his mother and teacher), told Hale that the program made him and his teammates consider becoming entrepreneurs as adults. Students and teachers in the program said the most valuable lesson may have been that there is opportunity in Appalachia. “It helped them see that they are not necessarily stuck,” Lawrence County teacher Joe Halfhill told Hale. “If they have a new idea or a twist on an old idea they don’t have to do what they have always done, what their parents did.”

The project is run by the Kentucky Entrepreneurial Coaches Institute at the University of Kentucky, which trained 55 teachers in 15 of the 40 Kentucky counties labeled economically distressed by the Appalachian Regional Commission. Institute Director Ron Hustedde said it reached nearly 1,700 students and created close to 500 small businesses. He noted that 18 percent of rural Americans already have their own business, and that number is projected to rise. (Read more)