During these summer weeks my Girls Who Code Students have graduated the school year and moving on to bigger and better things. I am proud of all of them and even hope to cross paths with them again one day. With that being said I now have more free time to focus on one of my other hobbies, entrepreneurship.
I was looking for volunteer opportunities in my area and came across one that was definitely unique from the rest. First impressions are that I have never seen a volunteer opportunity that had anything to do with entrepreneurship skills. Most volunteer opportunities that I see involve serving food to the homeless, volunteering at a children’s hospital, tutoring at a school, etc. With most of these, I have learned skills that I also apply with my job now. I enjoyed every volunteer position I ever took and each one has taught me something different or added on to shaping my character. I say that because if you are thinking about volunteering know that you can try out multiple! Just be careful not to try and do them all at once, I know how exciting! but overwhelming that can be.
The SCORE volunteer position from my understanding is a group of people who are willing to mentor small business owners. Now everyone does not have experience in mentoring, let alone how to mentor a business owner in that case, you yourself will receive a mentor to teach you how to do it. I think an awesome aspect of this is that most people, if not all the mentors actually have a self-started business as well. The mentors are speaking from experience and dealing with the current market themselves. Also for people who don’t have the experience to mentor a buisness you can use your hobbies and skills to help these businesses as well. For example, anyone who wouldn’t mind fixing a church’s computer for free could offer some services for them for a problem that could’ve been more costly and time-consuming. SCORE is a non-profit organization whose mission is to help those with small businesses. It also says on their website that they are partnered with SBA, the Small Business Association.
I am writing this to inform more people about this opportunity and if it is something that interests them, I dare them to take a chance and make a difference in their small business community.
It was so much fun and everyone was engaged and just like in our coding activities we talked about what we expected to happen, what actually happened, if we were to do this activity again what would we do differently. I really like to get students to think rather than just state only what they are observing. I think it applies in all aspects of life as in yes you could have had a bad day but was it really a bad day or was it a bad start to the day or a bad lunch hour? Everything that we do gives us an opportunity to think creatively and imagine what-ifs that are beneficial to the situation. That is a little off topic but I liked that they were doing more than stating the current situation and thinking about even the process of making slime because I think that is something that can help them our in life not even just coding.
