The Young Entrepreneurs Club is an initiative developed by Fingal Libraries in association with the Europe Direct Information Centre at Blanchardstown Library. Each club consists of twenty fifth and sixth class pupils from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds who spend eleven weeks learning about how to set up and run a business.
The main objective of the club is to foster an interest in entrepreneurship and business among primary school pupils. The long term aim is that some of these young people will themselves become the entrepreneurs, innovators and job creators of the future.
The Young Entrepreneurs are given access to and encouraged to use all of the resources available in the library.
The presentation will demonstrate the steps we took to achieve these objectives and how we plan to improve and expand the club going forward.
Firstly, we will describe where the idea for the club came from and how it ties in with the strategic objectives of Irish libraries and Europe Direct.
Secondly, we will describe the planning that took place with the facilitator before the club was launched. This included deciding what format the club would take; the content; and how to reach potential members and their parents. We will also describe the weekly preparation that was carried out before and after each club session.
Thirdly, we will demonstrate how the first Young Entrepreneurs Club worked in practice and how we adapted subsequent clubs based on the knowledge gained and feedback received.
The last part of the presentation will deal with how we evaluate the club. We will describe our evaluation methods and present some of the feedback we received from club participants, parents and facilitators. Finally, we will present our conclusions as to how well we achieved the objectives discussed at the beginning of our presentation.