A Basement for Business

One of the first distinctives I learned about California when I moved here was that there are little to no basements in houses or buildings. Imagine then my surprise when we opened up our Teen Center in Los Angeles six years ago, after it had been essentially abandoned for decades, and there was a basement! I was excited about what could be done there, but it was in bad shape. It had a window that opened up to the sidewalk above it. And this window would be key. When I first saw the space, my mind immediately jumped to the possibility of running a screen-printing operation: screening shirts, shorts, hats, hoodies, and the like. We could do all of our in-house screen-printing for World Impact, as well as provide job-training options for our youth! Without the window, there would be too many fumes to make it viable.

Fast-forward six years to this summer, when that initial seed of an idea finally grew to a sprout. With the help of a grant and a connection to a local screen printer who was looking for a space to operate out of as a missional partner with World Impact, we were able to develop a Young Entrepreneur’s Program for our community youth. What started as a conversation about simply hiring some teens to help this local screen printer out as a summer job for them turned into a full-fledged entrepreneurial endeavor.

The four high school students in the program submitted an application and were interviewed. They had an orientation about the job and its expectations, and then they went through a series of knowledge and skill-based trainings that ran the gamut of formulating business plans, purchasing, graphic design, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, silk screening, marketing, and spreadsheets and bookkeeping. They even had the opportunity to hear five different local business professionals share their own personal experiences of entrepreneurship, business ethics, etc. To see the youth’s eyes light up when they learned a new skill, when they actually created products, when they sold them to others…this was the fruit for me. I am so excited by the excellence, vision, and energy these four students brought, and how it might play out in their own immediate and far futures. Please continue to pray for us as we equip and empower the youth of South LA to be Kingdom Builders!