Work done along Narayan Ghiotti & Azadeh Jalali
The Project Youthbuild director, Jonathan Leslie, and staff like Danyel Williams have been mentioning how many students showed interest in starting their own business. In the Spring of 2023, MxD students David Clulow, Narayan Ghiotti, Hien Phan, and Akbar Seknun worked with PYB staff to facilitate two workshops based around students exploring business innovation and pitching product ideas. These workshops were fun and engaging for the students and many shared enthusiasm to do this again.
In the Spring of 2024 PYB staff and MxD professor Maria Rogal discussed this topic being addressed again. PYB staff decided that rather than a brief series of workshops they would like a series of 8 workshops that could coincide with the student’s semester and delve deeper into the subject. In order to co-create a series with students we decided to facilitate interactive discovery sessions using creative making, story-telling, and group discussions in order to take into account the student’s lived experiences, values and interests..
Opening up to the outside world as a young adult while discovering who you are can be challenging, especially in situations where the system you are in is set up to prevent you from succeeding. Students at Project YouthBuild (PYB) must over- come these socioeconomic barriers on a daily basis while at the same time carry- ing the weight of life responsibilities that many young adults never face. Nevertheless, these students continue to dream and defy the odds to build a ca- reer of their own.
How can we work together with PYB students to understand their needs, interests and goals around starting a business? How can we contribute to building their self-esteem to help them succeed? What is it like for them to dream of becoming career independent? These are some of the questions that we ask ourselves as we begin developing the workshops “Exploring Starting a Business”.