Cooper Harness, Marshall Peters and Cole Rasmuson took home the awards for the 15 to 19 age group, while judges selected the pitches of Naevi Morrison, Ethan Rabou and Katie Rice for the 10 to 14 age group. Shawn Bock’s pitch for a Buffalo High School-themed sweatshirt company won the Spirit of Wyoming Award, which is awarded to a proposal that focuses on community improvement.

The Wyoming Afterschool Alliance’s Young Entrepreneur Pitch Challenge asks the state’s students to develop an idea for a product or service that would benefit their community, the environment or the state of Wyoming.

The crop of young entrepreneurs this fall proposed a number of businesses that would serve that mission, including an app that would allow those contending with phone addictions to lock their phones and a series of schools that would teach young people life skills and allow them opportunities to explore career paths.

Each winner received $100 prizes for seed money for their businesses, said Kate Foster, a program associate with the Wyoming Afterschool Alliance.

The Wyoming Afterschool Alliance started the pitch challenge program in 2020 with a grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which supports community nonprofits working in the areas of education, the environment, inequality and civic engagement.

The program got off to a choppy start after the coronavirus pandemic altered plans for in-person learning, but the Wyoming Afterschool Alliance and its partners pivoted, hosting roundtables and zoom tutorials, Foster said.

Students currently work through a series of modules with videos and exercises that offer insights from business owners and entrepreneurs in Wyoming. The exercises walk students through the entrepreneurial process, from identifying a problem and a solution to constructing a business model and finally pitching their idea.

The Wyoming Afterschool Alliance has held five pitch challenges since 2020, with 50 to 75 students from across the state participating in each challenge, Foster said.

Though the program lends itself to students who are interested in business or who have already started their own businesses, it is not exclusive to those students. Each challenge is designed to spur creative thinking and problem solving that can help young people in their futures, Foster said.

“Entrepreneurial thinking has six features: creativity, curiosity, growth mindset, empathy, problem solving and embracing failure,” Foster said. “Whether or not they have a business currently in operation, the pitch challenge helps them practice those six skill sets.”

With each challenge, the Wyoming Afterschool Alliance has aimed to grow involvement by partnering with teachers and after-school providers. Many of the winners this fall and in past pitch challenges hail from Buffalo, where the Wyoming Afterschool Alliance has found a key ally in Kami Kennedy, a business and entrepreneurship teacher at Buffalo High School.

Kennedy leads four classes that lean heavily on experiential learning, with students participating in negotiation and market research exercises, as well as a market day in which students build and run their own business for a day.

She also helps Buffalo High School to run a startup challenge. Each of the last two years students have received $5,000 toward starting businesses they proposed for the event, Kennedy said.

Kennedy has incorporated the Wyoming Afterschool Alliance’s pitch challenge into each of her classes, and her students often use the challenge as an opportunity to refine the businesses they have already been developing in class.

“It’s just great practice and a good way to communicate, which is important for entrepreneurs,” Kennedy said.

For Kennedy, there is no replacement for the real-world opportunities that the pitch challenge and their other coursework affords.

“Experiential learning is embedded in everything we do because I don’t believe we learn unless we do,” she said.

Kennedy’s belief in experiential learning is a sentiment shared by many Wyoming educators, and that is increasingly a focus of the Wyoming Department of Education as it looks to strengthen career and technical education in the state.

In its final report released earlier this month, Gov. Mark Gordon’s Reimagining and Innovating the Delivery of Education (RIDE) advisory group called for career-oriented pathways in schools that would give students opportunities for hands-on learning and skill building in the fields they hope to pursue.

The Wyoming Afterschool Alliance’s Young Entrepreneur Pitch Challenge complements ongoing efforts to better prepare students for their futures, Foster said.

“We’re helping students who are currently in Wyoming schools and after-school programs (to) express themselves and practice their creativity and make a difference in communities today,” she said. “We also hope that they develop skills that will take them into the future and ultimately help Wyoming’s communities grow and thrive.”

The entrepreneurship encouraged by the pitch challenge serves as an important launching point, giving students a foundation from which to build, Kennedy said.

“The entrepreneurial mindset is critical whatever career path you take,” she said. “No matter what you decide to do, you need to be passionate about it and responsible, and you have to have freedom and integrity.”