Our Work

Teaching Entrepreneurship

GIVE's primary focus is teaching entrepreneurship in low-income communities. We work with established NGOs and nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs, and business groups to manage and promote initiatives through various channels worldwide.

Our projects focus on teaching youth (grades 8-12), young adults (ages 18-30), and women in developing countries essential business skills, including the ability to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, create a viable business plan, launch their own small businesses, and thereby improve their own conditions and the economy of their local communities.

Goals for our programs include:

• Bring entrepreneurial training to low-income communities
• Rely on proven models to guide and promote initiatives
• Connect aspiring entrepreneurs with business mentors
• Open global markets to small-scale entrepreneurs
• Attract interested individuals and investors
• Create business partnerships around the world

"Making Cents" Program Curriculum

GIVE has recently partnered with Making Cents, an international organization specializing in entrepreneurial training program development for micro, small and medium entrepreneurs worldwide. This partnership will enable GIVE to utilize the Making Cents curriculum for upcoming global projects, allowing us to adapt to local conditions and create scalable entrepreneurship training programs.

The Making Cents curriculum is used by microenterprise development organizations and youth entrepreneurship programs in 22 states and in 17 countries around the world. Courses are based on experiential learning methodology, which build entrepreneurs' basic skills and confidence and fosters entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative-thinking.

Many youth, women, and marginalized groups have highly-developed survival skills but cannot imagine themselves in business. For these groups, experiential-learning is especially important because it affirms their existing skills and resources while inviting them to apply these to the entrepreneurship sphere.

Experiential-learning methodology brings real-life experience and opportunity into the training room and creates learning that is relevant and retained over the long-term. The benefits of experiential learning are that:

• participants continually bring their own experiences into the learning process so that the learning, which is based upon scenarios from their own lives and communities, is relevant to their lives and goals;
• participants gain a deep understanding of concepts, their inter-relation and how to apply them;
• participants retain the learning, as it relates directly to their experience and is learned interactively, with participants learning from each other in addition to learning from the training curriculum;
• the experiential-learning approach engages the whole person in developing business skills and personal characteristics, including negotiation skills, decision-making confidence, self-esteem, and entrepreneurial thinking.

Experiential-learning is effective with all sectors of the population and has proven to be a particularly significant learning approach with youth, women and marginalized groups. Experiential-learning also builds self-esteem and motivation and leads to the sense of empowerment that is so often the starting point of business success.