Description
The Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lyles Center) is a licensed partner with Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), which provides entrepreneurship education programs to young people from low-income communities to enhance their economic productivity by improving their business, academic and life skills.
NFTE programs teach entrepreneurship using curriculum that corresponds to high school reading levels and complexity. The curriculum is used in semester-long or year-long stand alone entrepreneurship elective courses, after school settings, or integrated with economics, marketing, or other academic courses.
Founded in New York City in 1987 by Steve Mariotti, a former entrepreneur turned high school math teacher in the South Bronx, NFTE began as a program to prevent dropouts and improve academic performance among students who were at risk of failing or quitting school. Combining his business background with his desire to teach at-risk students, Steve discovered that when young people from low-income communities are given the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship, their innate "street smarts" can easily develop into "academic smarts" and "business smarts." Through entrepreneurship, young people discover that what they are learning in the classroom is relevant to the real world.
To date, NFTE has worked with nearly 450,000 young people from low-income communities in programs across the U.S. and around the world.
