Congratulations to Skyler B. and Junior M. for this honor of being recognized and awarded the
EY Young Entrepreneur of the Year® Award for Central Texas!
Thursday, June 23rd we had the opportunity to attend the EY Entrepreneur of the Year® Awards to watch two JA students receive the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for Central Texas at ACL Live.
Proud is not a big enough word for how we at JA, their mentor- Edgar Jimenez, and their Travis High educator- Ms. McClure feel about these students’ work building and executing their JA company, Vending Co.
Thank you to EY for giving this opportunity to these deserving Travis Early Collage High School students. They had a life changing experience in JA Company Program®- launching and running their companies but this honor was beyond special for them and they felt special, validated, and valued.
“EY has embarked on a bold ambition to positively affect 1 billion lives by 2030. Investing in programs that bring entrepreneurial education to young people is critical to this mission, which makes us proud to support organizations like Junior Achievement and its students. Junior Achievement shares in our vision that every young person can be an entrepreneur if they have the right access, resources and experiences to nurture their dreams. Our aspiration is to develop the young entrepreneurs who will be our next generation EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® participants!” ~Anna Tallent, EY Partner, Assurance Services, and Entrepreneur Of The Year® Central Texas Program Co-Director
Skyler B., Senior at Travis High and Co-CEO of Vending Co. shared, “We were so inspired that we wish to continue our entrepreneurial experience and keep our business running next school year and possibly branch out of just our high school. We started out not believing we could be successful, but then we worked hard in order to make ourselves something.”
Junior M., Junior at Travis High and Co-CEO of Vending Co. wrote in his essay, “Skyler and I, at first, were not that interested in doing this business idea but when we gathered a team that was dedicated and dared to sell and trusted us to help guide them to start making money, it was phenomenal. That courage, determination, and a wonderful collaboration that our crew loved, was an astonishing moment that I and Skyler would never believe could work, and yet it did. We would like to continue to run this business next year, but with even more confidence and courage.”
All of this growth and opportunity for our JA students would not have been possible without our dedicated volunteer mentors like, Edgar Uriel Jimenez Gonzalez, Technology Consultant from EY. He shared with us, “If there is one thing that I learned while working with these students is that there is undiscovered potential within our school systems- all it takes is for someone to believe in our future generation, to have them bloom and show the world their talent. As the first law of physics is stated by Sir Isaac Newton, ‘An object will remain at rest or in a uniform state of motion unless that state is changed by an external force.’ We must become that external force, and push the future generation to greater heights.”
#OpportunityIsForEveryone
