Local startup incubator Seed Spot held an open house for high schools Thursday night in an effort to promote its entrepreneurship program for young students.
Seed Spot is a nonprofit incubator for up-and-coming business-minded people in Phoenix whose ideas focus on supporting the community. By providing mentorship, constructive criticism and investor contacts, Seed Spot helps budding entrepreneurs kick-start their ideas.
After years of guiding businesses, Seed Spot started a high school curriculum last summer that focuses on cultivating the entrepreneurial spirit at a young age.
Courtney Klein, Seed Spot’s co-founder and CEO, presented that model to a room of high school administrators, teachers and students.
“Our mission at Seed Spot is to really nurture student passions to solve real world problems,” Klein said. “We know that entrepreneurship and problem solving is cross-disciplinary – this is not a business exercise.”
Seed Spot’s philosophy is to provide students with tools, resources and mentorship to help train their ability to solve societal problems, Klein said.
Caroline Fabricius Ahlgreen, a senior at the Tesseract School, is part of the pilot program that launched at her school. She said Seed Spot is helping her to confidently master the business trade.
“I thought the business world was so aggressive and competitive and people were going to knock each other down,” Ahlgreen said. “But here everyone has such different ideas and everyone is so passionate about their single idea that they’re totally willing to help you out.”
Ahlgreen’s group is developing the Braille-Board, a prototype phone case that helps blind and visually impaired people better use their cellphones with a Bluetooth braille keyboard.
Part of the Seed Spot curriculum is to place students in groups where each member can bring a unique skill set to the table, forcing them to brainstorm with students outside of their comfort zone.
“I have to say that at first it was difficult as I was put into a group that I had not expected going into the class,” Ahlgreen said. “I had an ideal group in mind.”
Despite her initial apprehensions, she said she realized the diverse mindsets in her group allowed for a broader range of ideas and solutions to work with.
Marco Garbarino, a teacher at the Tesseract School, is the primary educator in Seed Spot’s pilot program and works in tandem with Klein to improve the curriculum.
As an experienced businessman and teacher, Garbarino said he was able to marry those two skillsets while working with Klein at Seed Spot.
He said introducing entrepreneurship to high school students is essential because at that age they are not hinged by serious budget constraints and are mentally willing to take the risks required to invent products that can change the world.
“I’m very inspired by my students,” Garbarino said. “This really gave me a venue to utilize my experience as an entrepreneur and an educator to allow these students to really thrive.”
Seed Spot’s curriculum follows a 12-unit guideline that combines all of the topics and lessons learned during high school with Power Point presentations and binders of educational materials.
Despite the pilot program launching at the private Tesseract school, Klein wants to push Seed Spot’s class into public and charter schools as well.
The program is not free, however, as Seed Spot charges schools an initial fee and an ongoing support fee. Klein said philanthropic funding is available to help based on the school’s capacity to pay for the program.
Seed Spot is not Klein’s first foray into social work. As a senior at Arizona State University, Klein helped start New Global Citizens, a nonprofit that helps educate high school youth about global issues and empower them with similar skills Seed Spot focuses on.
She said the only reason New Global Citizens successfully launched was because she had a team of mentors and experienced business people to lean on, a sentiment she wants the students at Seed Spot to benefit from as well.
“When I left New Global Citizens I started to think, ‘if you’re a dreamer or if you’re an entrepreneur, where do you go if you want that community?’” Klein said. “I didn’t know, so I decided to build one.”
Students in Seed Spot’s high school program will be debuting their projects publicly at the “Demo Day” event at Herberger Theater Center on May 19. Tickets are available online.
Contact the reporter at nlatona@asu.edu
