This Class Is ‘Entrepreneurship’ On Steroids For New Brunswick Students
SAINT JOHN – When Ries Van Beek was teaching entrepreneurship in a classroom at St. Malachy’s Memorial High School in Saint John, he would begin the semester by asking the students a few questions.
“I would ask everyone on the first day, ‘How many people know someone who has left the province for work?’,” says Van Beek. “Almost every hand would go up.”
He then asked:
“How many of you think you’re going to leave New Brunswick to get the job you want?”
Almost every student’s hand went up.
“It was just chilling,” says Van Beek. “I have two kids and I thought, ‘this is their destiny, to think they have to leave.”
But a different kind of entrepreneurship class for high school students run out of Connexionworks in uptown Saint John wants to have students answering that question differently by the end of the term.
The Idea Centre is a co-op style program designed to develop student-led businesses. For two periods each day, students learn to develop and grow their business and social enterprises. They receive mentorship and expertise from entrepreneurs, social innovators and other community builders, all while receiving school credits for their work. The course is now available to students across New Brunswick, with students outside of Saint John tuning in virtually with local facilitators at their school.
The Idea Centre started several years ago as a way to build on the experience of in-school entrepreneurship classes. In a traditional high school entrepreneurship class, students would learn how to create and launch a small business, which would often conclude with some sort of market at the school at the end of the semester. Though this is a valuable experience for many students, teachers like Van Beek saw the need to take things a step further.
“Those were great opportunities for kids to learn business skills, but we would see kids who had bigger ideas or really innovative ideas and after the market, it would just kind of stall,” says Van Beek.
So with the help of the Economic Development Greater Saint John (EDGSJ), Connexionworks and the support of Anglophone South School District, the Department of Education and other community partners, the Idea Centre was launched.
“It’s really like entrepreneurship and co-op on steroids,” says Van Beek.
The course covers everything you need to know to start a business. from ideation, validation, market research, pitching, and beyond.
“They have to create a one-page business plan, they have to do an elevator pitch, then they have to do a longer pitch after that,” says Stacey Wood, a Saint John High School teacher who’s the online coordinator for the program. “It’s really all of the stages that an entrepreneur if they were starting their own business, service or charity, would go through.”
Hosted in the entrepreneurial co-working hub of Connexionworks, the Idea Centre gives students more freedom and access to resources and expertise they wouldn’t have had in a traditional classroom.
“It’s really outside the box. The students we tend to get are students who are risk-takers, students who are creative, students who are looking to do something different, because it’s just so different from regular school,” says Wood.
It’s so fun because when they first come they’re like, ‘okay, is this real? I’m actually going to get high school credits to create my own business?'”
The course brings in guest speakers, mentors and experts from the community, many of whom are also working out of Connexionworks, to help students execute their ideas.
“Everybody in New Brunswick wants to help keep young people here and help them see their opportunities. Entrepreneurs are team players. They’re not like big cooperate entities that want to crush the competition, they want to help each other succeed,” says Van Beek.
“It’s been wonderful there really hasn’t been anybody who’s said, ‘no, I won’t talk to your student.'”
Some of the student’s businesses get real-world traction (and in some cases, Huddle stories!) with J’s Flies and College Fund Coffee, two notable examples. But regardless of whether or not the student decides to pursue their business after the semester, one of the Idea Centre’s missions is to expose students to all the more unconventional career paths.
“We still have students who are still working in an industrial revolution model, where for them and their parents there are four jobs you can have. You can be a lawyer, you can be a teacher, you can be a doctor, you can be engineers,” says Wood. “Even in school, they’re still very much directed into those avenues and there are so many other things they can do. There are so many opportunities.”
Recent high school graduate and Idea Centre student Eric Cuenat, who is now taking software engineering at university, says the centre teaches students important real-life skills they will use in whatever career they choose.
“The biggest difference in the real-life skills they teach you here. They will send you outside to talk to people. They will make you pitch to strangers. They will put you on the spot. It’s real-life things that could possibly happen,” says Cuenat.
“Now that I’m in university, I’m online and suddenly I have to talk to all these strangers. I feel like I’ve been taught so well how to speak to a big audience, I don’t stress out about it.”
Grade 12 Saint John High student Nihma Hussain has been at the Idea Centre during this fall semester and is developing a business plan for her henna business. She says the course has made her excited to come to school.
“It’s the same thing for so many other students in high school. You’re just not excited to go to school. You’re not excited to go into a class and hear a lecture and have to take notes and don’t talk to anybody,” she says. “Here, it’s such a collaborative and different experience and it makes me excited to come here every single day because it’s going to be something different every single day.”
For students, the end goal of the course isn’t to pass an exam, it’s to have learned how to create a viable business or social enterprise from scratch.
The objective isn’t to pass a test, it’s to grow yourself and get your ideas on the table and build yourself,” says Hussain.
A Future Model For Education
Since launching a few years ago, the Idea Centre has gained traction with students across the province.
“The word is spreading. This is the first year that I haven’t gone out to guidance offices and sat down with kids and explained it to them,” says Van Beek. “We’re full of students who have heard about it and wanted to take it and applied for it, the schools recommended them and here they are.”
Looking ahead to the program’s future, Van Beek says the school system is looking at different ways to get students aware of entrepreneurship before senior year.
“They’re excited to get me to go out and visit middle schools and grade 9 classrooms and spread the word that these kinds of opportunities exist and do workshops virtually or in-person to support that,” he says. “Also, schools that are doing markets to try and encourage them to consider doing idea markets instead of merely traditional things.”
Van Beek says the Department of Education is also exploring apply the Idea Centre’s model to other industries and fields, like healthcare and energy.
“The department is also looking at the ‘centres of excellence’ and opportunities to grow the model and other industries,” he says. “I think there is a really good partnership between our district and the department for that.”
The Idea Centre may not be the right course for all students. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, after all. But for those who do or those who simply want to learn those skills, it could be the perfect course for them, and Van Beek says there are still many students they’ve yet to reach.
“We just want to ensure that students are aware of these opportunities. It’s not for everybody,” he says. “Not everybody is ready to take a big risk and get out of their comfort zone, but we know there are tonnes of kids that would love it. Kids all over New Brunswick have this opportunity and they don’t know it.”