Course: Grade 12 Entrepreneurship
Date: Fall 2021 – In-Person Learning
Teacher: Aaron Hesman
The students in the Entrepreneurship class partnered with Compassion Canada to create and carry out a fundraising campaign to raise money for one of the ministries of Compassion. Working together as a class and in collaboration with Compassion, students developed their entrepreneurial skills as they chose a fundraiser idea, set a fundraising goal, and executed the fundraiser. Students were put on five teams to optimize workflow: management, legal, financial, web design and promotions. The fundraiser consisted of a week-long fundraising competition between homerooms, a bake sale and a pancake breakfast. By the end of the campaign, the students involved were proud to have raised over $8000 for Compassion, helping to provide laptops for children in need to help provide them with an education.
When beginning this project, much of the plan was open-ended to allow for students to push themselves and be creative in the process of developing the fundraiser. It was great to see students collaborate and take ownership over the work they were doing. They gained real and relevant experience throughout this process, working with real people and real money. As Christians, it is important to understand that entrepreneurship isn’t always about being self-serving, but that the skills of an entrepreneur can and should be used to do good for others in our world (Philippians 2:3). Through this project, students used their gifts to glorify God by making a positive difference in the world.
– Aaron Hesman, Teacher
My initial reaction to this project was definitely excitement, as I thought it would be a very fun opportunity to develop a way to raise money in the school. I definitely questioned it as well, as I didn’t know if it would all be possible mainly due to COVID. The most challenging part of this project was definitely bringing our vision to life, whether it was by finding the correct supplies or just figuring out exactly what to do, when and how to do it.
Some skills that I learned were definitely time management, (and management in general), as well as people skills, and most definitely skills of how to work as a company through all splitting into different work groups and having meetings to discuss what everyone was doing and how it was going. The biggest and best takeaway from all this, however, was definitely how we were able to blow our original three fundraising goals out of the water.
Noah Vanderlaan, Student