At 17 years-old most kids are keeping up on TV shows, taking part in school clubs, or participating in after school sports, not starting a company. For those teens that have that entrepreneurial spirit, Seed Spot, the socially-conscious incubator, offers the NEXT program.
The program is designed to give high school students the resources, skills, and knowledge to solve real world problems to fuel their passion.
Seed Spot announced they are expanding the program nationally for the 2016-2017 school year.
“We basically started about a year and a half ago piloting our program at the Tesseract School,” Gretchen Naugle with Seed Spot NEXT said. This led to the creation of a one-year course. “We are currently piloting the one year course at a public, private, and charter school,” she said.
Seed Spot NEXT offers both a semester course and a year-long after school program called “Intro to Social Entrepreneurship”. The program is a cross-disciplinary curriculum-based program that can be taught as an elective course at schools. Students will have mentors as well.
At the end of the program, students present their startup ideas at the Seed Spot Demo Day with the current class of ventures housed at Seed Spot incubator.
READ: Seed Spot launches entrepreneur program for high school students
The program has already been used at five different sites. Over 50 schools are currently on the waiting list.
“We are receiving quite a bit of interest with only a little bit of marketing,” Naugle said. The program has even received interest from Turkey, Senegal, and other emerging markets.
Current national markets that have shown interest include San Francisco, Montana, New York City, and Virginia. No contracts have been finalized yet.
“Based on that demand we are looking to scale this program first national and ultimately international,” Naugle said.
David Levinson has been hired as part of the NEXT program to help establish and manage partnerships with interested schools and districts.
Interested schools can sign up for the waiting list here. There is a cost associated with the program.
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Photos courtesy of Seed Spot
