Youth Entrepreneurship Education Program – Arrowhead Business Group

About Arrowhead Business Group

Arrowhead Business Group is a multi-session youth entrepreneurship education program offering hands-on skills training for adolescents. Arrowhead Business Group:

  • Is strengths-based
  • Rooted in a positive youth development framework
  • Teaches basic business development knowledge and skills
  • Promotes life skills, resilience and youth self-efficacy
  • Offers support and mentorship to launch youth business
  • Develops local economic and entrepreneurial capacity
  • Entrepreneurship Education

Entrepreneurship education is a new approach to promote adolescent mental health and well-being. Entrepreneurship education fosters adolescent connectedness to caring adults, healthy peers and school. Youth receiving entrepreneurship education are more likely to have better grades, complete college and have greater career aspirations. They are also less likely to use drugs and alcohol and engage in risky behavior. Entrepreneurship education also addresses poverty and unemployment in under-resourced populations and makes an explicit commitment to capacity building and community health.

Evaluation

Arrowhead Business Group is currently being evaluated through a longitudinal Randomized Controlled Trial with 450 White Mountain Apache adolescents ages 13-16 for impacts on psychosocial, behavioral, educational and economic outcomes.

Funders and replication partners: This project is supported in part by the Native American Research Center for Health of the National Institutes of Health and Barclays Bank funds.