As people throughout the world struggle to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, they are seeing a new landscape emerge that is filled with unforeseen and sometimes daunting challenges. Dr. J.D. LaRock of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) in his short tenure as President and CEO has already faced the closing of schools where the NFTE curriculum is taught and the beginning of an economic recession.
The NFTE curriculum each year is taught to over 100,000 mostly under-resourced middle and high school students across the U.S. and in 9 countries. At its core is “the entrepreneurial mindset”, a way of thinking that Dr. LaRock says he is strongly embracing to navigate NFTE through these very difficult times. He never imagined these challenges when he decided to move from being an educator and an education policy advisor for the late Senator Ted Kennedy and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to the helm of an education not for profit.
Dr. LaRock’s initial decision to become an educator was based on his intrinsic belief that education improves people’s lives. Later in his career when serving as the head of Massachusetts’ workforce development corporation, The Commonwealth Corporation, he saw that entrepreneurship could also be a force in people’s lives. In that instance, it was an entrepreneurship program for incarcerated youth who developed and launched a business while in their juvenile facility.
“I saw young people who had great challenges in their lives, no opportunities, no social capital, no sense of self-empowerment,” Dr. LaRock said. “They were then able to find self-empowerment because they were encouraged to identify an idea that was authentic to who they were as a person, develop it and bring it out to the world.”
His time as a professor at Northeastern University was also foundational to his decision to join NFTE. Being associated with a university with a strong experiential learning program he saw how valuable it was for students to gain real world experience. The NFTE program is an entrepreneurial experiential program and Dr. LaRock feels that it is particularly helpful to those who are disadvantaged as it gives them business exposure that provides some context for starting their own businesses.
“The experiential way of learning and learning about work is successful. It really helps young people find out who they are, what they want to do for a lifetime, what they like and what they don’t like” he said.
But the pandemic has brought a new reality to the social and business arenas and NFTE, like almost all organizations, is concerned with its impact. It relies upon philanthropy, corporate sponsors, and the licensing of their curriculum.
“I believe donors, philanthropies and school districts will understand that what we have to offer is very responsive to the needs of this time and so we are hopeful that we can continue to get our message out there and demonstrate our value proposition to the world,” he explained.
For the students Dr. LaRock sees a unique opportunity as well as a challenge. They now have a chance to apply the entrepreneurial mindset to their business ideas and plans to adapt to the pandemic. Most importantly, they will bring that unique experience into their careers.
Dr. LaRock is confident of the NFTE’s influence on students’ lives based on a number of metrics. One in four NFTE students have started a business, ranging from computer repair, a gluten free bakery, and one very notable success, the real estate firm Compass founded by Robert Reffkin. NFTE’s students attend and graduate from college at a higher than average rate. This is particularly significant because their students are typically non-white and come from disadvantaged communities.
While these are impressive statistics, he emphasizes that those who don’t start a business also gain the entrepreneurial mindset, a skill set of communication, collaboration, problem solving, future orientation and an ability to assess risk. When the classroom instruction is combined with students working with mentors from their corporate sponsors and participating in NFTE’s national competition, those skills are achieved at a statistically significant level—a great setup for their future.
Dr. LaRock has adapted their program to be online as schools have had to close. The teachers they trained to teach the entrepreneurial mindset have also adapted, broadly embracing the move so the spring semester was not lost.
But he knows more needs to be done.
“A good portion of our students are in underserved communities and may not have a computer at home to log in,” he said. “It raises the issue of social inequity- and we need to make sure that the pandemic does not widen that gap.”
