These Teens Mean Busine$$ International Academy (Virtual)

We provide need-based scholarships, awarding amounts based on household income and special financial circumstances. Call 608-298-6949 for more information and to request a scholarship application.

During our second international virtual exchange, the team at Stepping Stone International — a nonprofit serving vulnerable youth in Botswana — selected nine of their teens to enroll in the Academy along with participating U.S. students. Over four weeks, students connected virtually, exploring foundational business concepts like management and finance before designing and pitching business ideas to address global issues of importance to them: gun violence, racism, world hunger, and poverty. These business ideas included a music concert that would donate profits to organizations addressing gun violence, cultural parties that would spread cross-cultural awareness and acceptance, writer workshops that would help fund charities combating world hunger, and classes that would remove barriers to financial literacy.

In 2020, we launched our first-ever international virtual exchange, fostering cross-cultural, entrepreneurial collaboration between CEOs of Tomorrow teens and students from the Middle East International School in Doha, Qatar. Together, students selected three global issues of importance to them — access to healthcare, lack of education, and global warming. They collaborated to conduct research, present their findings, and detail action steps they could take to address these issues. Action steps included creating a fundraising campaign for Doctors Without Borders, making door-to-door visits in remote or impoverished areas to provide educational resources, and creating and circulating online posters highlighting the effects of global warming.