Summer Programs For Sports
General concerns of high school juniors: getting good grades, choosing a college, getting a date for Friday night. Goldoni Diligent, 17, a junior at Boston Latin Academy, has another to add to the list: getting his business off the ground.
Diligent, who was born in Haiti and has lived in Boston for most his life, recently participated in the Volleyball summer camp program, run by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).
Diligent is negotiating with Microsoft, NFTE's largest provider of funds, for start-up money for the business plan he designed as a student in the BizCamp program. The business he plans to start, RogueStar Productions, will design promotional advertising for owners of small, inner-city businesses, he said.
Diligent has experience in the field, working for Artists for Humanity, a nonprofit organization in South Boston, for 15 months. There he used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to design and print T-shirts for, among other clients, the Boston Red Sox.
He wants to start his business before he goes to college -- this year, he hopes. He'll run it out of his home, he said, perhaps hiring an employee to help out with software if he gets enough customers.
In addition to the regular BizCamp curriculum, he completed the BizTech program, which included online lessons and the business plan he presented to the class.
BizCamp ran for two weeks in July, then Diligent went on to work with Quincy Community Action Programs (QCAP) for a four-week internship in August. QCAP provides services and programs, such as Head Start Preschool and a first-time homebuyer program, to low-income residents. It was founded in the 1960s to assist low-income residents of Quincy, Braintree, Milton and Weymouth.
Diligent's was "the top business plan in the competition," in the opinion of NFTE's New England director, Ted Tyson. "His is really solid." Tyson said he sees Diligent's request to Microsoft or to NFTE, which has a revolving loan fund for student start-up businesses, as "very viable." "We'd love to have NFTE partially fund it. He can make it work," Tyson said.
The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship began its summer programs for high school students in 1989 in New York City. To date, 23,000 students have participated in both the summer and in-school programs. For his internship, which is a part of the BizCamp program, Diligent worked with David Tevilla, QCAP's information systems director.
The two were already well acquainted: Tevilla was Diligent's teacher from January to June in an after-school networking class Tevilla taught at Madison Park Technical-Vocational High School in Roxbury. The class was offered through a partnership with 3Com of California and the Boston public schools.
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