Neva Hines spent hours looking for internships her junior year at Ridgway Secondary School. She contacted at least eight businesses, and most of the time she didn’t receive a reply. This frustrating situation led her to come up with a business idea and potentially a new career path — and now she’s developing an app to help solve this problem for teenagers like herself.
Armed with $900 in seed money she was awarded through an entrepreneurship program, Hines plans to launch her app, CareerMe, this summer. CareerMe is a platform that helps create a communication channel for companies to recruit, hire, train and pay high school students for internships.
She’s one of three Ridgway students who were awarded startup funding after they took a business startup class and pitched their ideas to a panel of judges. Spark Lab, a six-week entrepreneurship class geared toward young people, supported Hines’ CareerMe, as well as two other Ridgway students’ businesses.
The panel also awarded Ridgway sophomore Sunny Wick’s business, Mountain Valley Photography, $650 for a new website, photography equipment, marketing and professional development opportunities. Mountain Valley Photography is dedicated to capturing portraits in beautiful Colorado scenery.
The panel awarded Ridgway senior Madeleine Miller $750 for her idea to start a nonprofit called Writer’s Bloc. The goal is for her to launch its pilot program in the spring. Writer’s Bloc creates community by helping young writers develop their skills, explore storytelling and connect with peers through interactive workshops.
These three students participated in Spark Lab, a class created by a local nonprofit called Homegrown Pathways. On Jan. 18, Spark Lab culminated in a Shark Tank-style pitch competition where the students presented business pitches to a panel of community leaders, funders and mentors. Each participant was allowed one slide and three minutes to show the panel and audience of 60 people their business.
Apart from the investments from the pitch competition, each Spark Lab participant received an additional $200 to spend however they wished. As a whole, Homegrown Pathways provided over $11,000 in investments toward the 12 students who took the course, according to the organization’s founder and CEO, Colin Lacy. The participants came from Mesa, Delta, Montrose and Ouray counties.
Homegrown Pathways Director of Operations and Communications Taylor Poynor said the pitch competition was an emotional event after seeing the students’ progression over the six weeks of Spark Lab.
“It was pretty cool to see what putting money toward young people’s ideas can really do,” she said.
Lacy hopes to grow the Spark Lab program and implement the course across rural Colorado to meet demand. He said it’s difficult for young Coloradans to stay in their hometowns and have careers as the cost of living skyrockets, and hopes that Spark Lab and entrepreneurship education will help youth have the choice to stay or return to their hometowns after high school.
“We don’t suffer from a lack of good ideas, rather we think our challenge is a deficit of empowered ideas,” Lacy said. “And for ideas to be empowered, they need to be identified, they need to be encouraged, and they need to be invested in. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do in Spark Lab: identify, encourage and invest in young people.”
Post-Spark Lab, the participants are now equipped to continue growing their businesses on their own.
“Now, after the pitch competition, they’ve given us the tools and they’ve helped us grow and helped us understand the process of starting a business, and now they’ve let us go and we’re out on our own,” Hines said.
