Young Entrepreneur Earns Competitive Program Placement

Ever since Teandra Armstrong volunteered her Saturdays washing and braiding hair at her cousin’s beauty salon she has dreamed of opening up her own shop. She says, “There’s a vibe. I don’t know. I can’t quite explain it. It’s just fun. Secrets are opened up [at the shop]. People can’t keep the stories to themselves anymore.” You get the sense in talking with Teandra that the beauty shop is her element and, as long as the neighborhood ladies keep coming and telling their stories, it will forever be her element.

Teandra is a part of our technology apprenticeship program for high school students, which meets three days a week after school through our partnerships with After School Matters and the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). Teandra is one of approximately 22 students who participate in the apprenticeship program each semester, including summers. The program is a place where she can be encouraged in her dream of opening her own beauty shop and receive the mentoring and skill training she needs to set her on a course to accomplish the dream.

Teandra is a sophomore at Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, located about a mile from our Center. This spring is her third semester in our apprenticeship program, where this past semester she crafted a business plan for her own beauty shop. Throughout the program and into the young entrepreneur’s small business competition, Teandra showed great promise. In looking forward to this summer she was recommended to the Rotary Job1 program by NFTE staff who watched her compete this beauty shop business plan. Job1 provides high school students, like Teandra, with substantive summer internships with local businesses, where students, like Teandra, will receive continued mentoring and advice from a professional business advisory team. She recently learned of her acceptance into the program, already spending one Saturday a month until the summer, in job readiness training. (She tells, with humble satisfaction, of this past Saturday’s group project to redesign the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate candy bar, providing a new slogan, logo and commercial for the company. Her teammates picked her design to expand upon – a design which ended up winning the day’s competition.)

We are proud of and excited for Teandra! “We will miss her [this summer],” says Vincent McCaskill, our technology center director, “but she is an example of what we hope the students will achieve.”