Letter to the editor teaser

Regarding the editorial “State pitch on business has promise” (July 17): A formal business retention and expansion plan, as proposed by Business Oregon’s Northeast business development officer, Brian McDowell, is a great idea. I hope it will also address the outmigration of youth, and the disconnect between the skills local business owners need to grow and thrive, and the educational and career choices of our teens.

In the early 2000s, I had a small sales and marketing consultancy, working with small business owners and nonprofit organizations in Eastern Oregon. I learned how desperate many entrepreneurs and nonprofit directors were for employees with business skills: sales/marketing, accounting/finance, IT/tech, and leadership/management.

Ernesto Sirolli’s work, and the business facilitation program that was started in Wallowa County as a result, showed that the most effective way to develop an economy is to grow from within. So I created a teen entrepreneur program to introduce more teens to entrepreneurship and the business skills entrepreneurs need to grow and thrive, in hopes more teens would choose entrepreneurship and business skills as a career and educational path, and bring those skills back home. Building Healthy Families, an Enterprise-based nonprofit, had grant funding available for “tutoring and mentoring” and in the fall of 2010, the Mentor Match Teen Entrepreneur program was born.

Now, 14 years later, the Mentor Match Teen Entrepreneur program has done what we hoped, and roughly one-third of past Mentor Matchers are living and working in Wallowa County. We have four new businesses as a result. Additionally, past Mentor Matchers have brought home degrees in accounting, finance, marketing, technology, natural resources and business administration; some have come back with trade skills, and other Mentor Matchers have applied what they learned as young entrepreneurs and gone straight into the local workforce. They are getting married, buying homes and having children — a total of 21 babies born to this group that chose to put their time, talents and newfound business skills to use in their hometowns.

We have learned that when teens are shown what they are capable of through entrepreneurship, they are transformed. And in many cases, they will come back to their hometown to transform their community.

Stacy Green

Enterprise