A new program called the Yes Program will begin soon at local schools. The goal of the program is to improve the community and to make the area a better place.
The official name is the Mercer County Yes Program (Young Entrepreneurs Society); the idea of the program is that business mentors will go into the middle schools and high schools starting with 8th grade. They will provide information and encouragement to help them develop their business ideas and, once they understand what they are going to do, the mentors will fund them for a small venture. The funding will be $150 a business.
Professor Jack E. Yeager, an Associate Professor of Finance, has spoken to business-owners in Princeton and other surrounding areas about mentoring high school and middle school students about opening their own businesses. “We have a handful of business mentors, including myself, that have been willing to commit to the mentorship. A few people and myself have already put funds into a non-profit organization to fund some businesses and we started, during the summer, to talk with the Mercer County School Board to make sure what we needed to be able to get into the schools,” says Yeager.
The program will be meeting with students early- to mid-September. The program will be “piloted” in schools beginning in Pikeview High School. The students will get the chance to build relationships with business and community leaders.
This program is not just for Concord University. “We don’t want this to be thought of as a Concord only program. Quite frankly, we are wanting to get all of the colleges in the area involved so we can get all the schools involved and to get all businesses in the county involved so it can become a county effort,” says Yeager.
Yeager hopes that more colleges and more students will help the program. “I’m interested in getting the rest of the campus to think about the possibility that maybe their path in life isn’t necessarily to work for someone else. Maybe it’s to go out and do their own thing, and find a way to make a living and be where they want to be financially while they pursue whatever their passions are.”
The economic situation in southern West Virginia has been difficult and more people have been leaving the state to find work. Yeager says benefits for the high school students is that they can get some hope or help. “Opportunity isn’t necessarily just about is there somebody out there who will give me a job. Sometimes it’s about wanting to change the world by offering something that is not currently offered.”
While in college, students can be too busy to focus on running their own business but the Yes Program can give the exposure in a real life setting to see what it is like to start your own business without having all the pressure and time commitment of running own your business while trying to finish college. The program can help everyone in the area and can be a “big bang for the buck”.
Yeager says the goal is to start at Pikeview High School then expand to every school in the county. “Once we feel like we have done this enough that we could write it all down, we can launch a playbook for this program and give it to the surrounding counties, and eventually we have it in the entire state. That is the long term goal.”