Students from St. Paul Regional High School brought home prize money and the pride of participating in the finals from Portage College’s second annual Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge on April 29.
The competition is open to students in any region serviced by Portage and is designed to get youth thinking about entrepreneurship, according to Bev Lockett, the Manager of the St. Paul Campus and Dean of Food Sciences.
“(It's) not necessarily going and opening my own business, because entrepreneurship is more about solving problems,” said Lockett.
To enter, students had to submit a video explaining their idea, which a panel of judges reviewed before inviting a select group to present for the first, second, and third place prizes. According to Lockett, there were 10 videos submitted, and four teams were invited to present.
“The criteria is for youth to find a problem, whether it’s in their school, their community, at home. What can they make better, what can they improve? We know business ideas come from solving problems, and so this entrepreneurship challenge was to find a problem, find a solution for it, and pitch your solution to the judges,” said Lockett.
Although first place went to a student from Athabasca for his idea of a pop can tab that would prevent contamination from bugs, dirt, or date rape drugs, three of the four teams asked to present to the judges in the final came from St. Paul Regional High School.
Second place went to Samantha Bespalko, Sydnie Bespalko, Taylor Fedoruk and Morgan Gerlinsky for their app “College Coin,” which would help students learn budgeting skills when they leave home for post secondary education.
“We just found this year, trying to juggle all the expenses we’re going to have to pay next year, that an app tailored towards university students was something we’d never seen before,” said Gerlinsky, who will be attending the University of Alberta to become a registered dietitian.
She and the other girls didn’t have to make the app functional for the competition, but they did have to give a presentation that included visuals of what it would look like, and clear ideas about what it would do and how it would solve the problem of budgeting for university and college.
“We are four really close friends and this is probably the last time we’ll do something as a group together, so I think spending this much effort and putting all this time together, and doing one last project together as friends and seeing it succeed was really special,” said Samantha Bespalko. After graduating high school, she plans to complete her Bachelor of Social Work at MacEwan University.
With second place came some college coin for each of the girls. They split the $1,500 prize four ways, netting each of them $375, or approximately one and a half textbooks.
Ben Jacques earned third place and $500 in the competition for his “Limelyte” idea, which included a detailed plan for renovating the old Peavey Mart building in St. Paul and turning it in to an arcade and hang out space for youth.
Jacques will be pursuing a Bachelor of Commerce from The King’s University in the fall, and when asked how he felt about his third place finish, he humbly called it “not a big deal” and asked to move on to the next question.
Jacques said the biggest thing he learned from the process was that he can’t do it all on his own.
“You need to work as a team to get things done properly and efficiently,” said Jacques.
Also participating in the Youth Entrepreneurship Final was Javar James, who suggested recycling old jeans for use as cotton fibre insulation in things like gloves.
“It was a good experience for me. The other ideas were beautiful, it stunned me that young people like myself came up with so many good ideas,” said James.
He said he learned that it’s about what you can take away from things like this, not just winning.
“And what I took away was that the world is moving in the right direction. Through the other presentations, they had an opportunity to tell us what they were about, each competitor had an innovative idea that would be good for youth, so the advancement of youth will be great in the future,” said James.
James will be attending Portage College for nursing this fall, and plans to go on to complete an undergraduate degree in psychology following that two-year program.
“I’m really proud of the kids. They put a lot of work in to this and it was really cool seeing them come up with an idea and then develop it and look in to a lot of those finer details like coming up with a business plan, coming up with a logo, a colour scheme. And presenting to the judges, and that’s a scary task sometimes for high school students. But they all came out of there really excited about their projects, and the judges were awesome with the kids and really made it a good experience for everybody,” said Angele Morrison, a career counsellor with St. Paul Education who worked with all of the students on their ideas and their presentations.
