Rural entrepreneurship news 1-25

More rural entrepreneurship news to report:

Developing an Entrepreneurship Culture

Ontario (Canada) is working to develop a culture of entrepreneurship in their youth. The Government of Ontario is funding Youth Entrepreneurship Partnerships.

Youth Entrepreneurship Partnerships provides grants to non-profit organizations for programs that promote the development of entrepreneurial skills in youths. Fourteen projects representing $1,597,000 in funding have been selected in the second round of proposals.

This second round of Youth Entrepreneurship Partnerships represents the largest amount of grant funding provided to non-profit organizations. In June 2006, $673,000 was awarded to six successful associations in the first round of the Partnership project.

Visit the Ministry’s site, or read the story at Newswire.ca.

Student encourages more youth entrepreneurship training

Ron Johnson, a junior at North Dakota State University, (USA) proposes training high school students to start businesses to address rural decline.

Johnson’s opinion piece also gives an explanation of the New Homestead Act. Read the whole article in The Spectrum. It’s worth the time.

Public/Private partnership for rural broadband means more than just Internet access

East Kootenay (British Columbia, Canada) local government (RDEK) is partnering with a private firm, Columbia Mountain Open Network (CMON), to propose a local community broadband network for their rural area.

Here’s how the public/private partnership is broken out:

CMON CEO Dan McCarthy explains the two components of the network are a broadband backbone and access to the individual homes. CMON would be responsible for building the network, starting with an engineering study to determine the placement of the fiber-optic cable and ending with the actual construction.
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As with other services of the RDEK (local government), only the people affected would pay for the project. In turn they would own the backbone and community network and any revenue collected would go back into the service, paying for operations, maintenance and debt payments.

The broadband service means more than internet connections.

This can be anything from internet access to video services, home security and music downloads, McCarthy explains. He points out it also gives people the ability to think outside the box. He gives an example from the birthplace of open networks, Sweden, where a father started sharing video from his children’s sports tournaments with help of open network broadband technology and is now running a successful internet video business. The network could also have great effects in the health care and education sectors, McCarthy adds.

Source: Kootenay News.

Kansas pulls together multiple proposals into one development agenda, focused on education

Kansas (USA) Governor Kathleen Sebelius has pulled together an economic development agenda, focused on education.
[Photo of Gov. Sebelius from Wikipedia.] Gov. Kathleen Sebelius

“Education will continue to be at the center of everything,” the governor told the audience attending the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce Chairman’s Breakfast. “But the focus is going to be on both ends of the K-12 program. We need to get children ready to learn when they enter kindergarten and we need easier, more nimble pathways to vocational education, community college and four-year colleges for our high school graduates.”

She said Kansas needs to make sure that tuition stays affordable and that vocational and community colleges have the programs to train the workers businesses need to keep jobs and add jobs in Kansas.

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“If the trained work force is not here, then those jobs won’t be here either.”

Sebelius also included some special rural development proposals.

To answer that challenge, Sebelius is creating the Office of Rural Opportunity within the Department of Commerce. That office will identify areas for Business Zone incentives that will encourage businesses to locate in rural communities.

“Our towns have tremendous potential,” she said. “They offer good infrastructure, room to grow and great people. They just have to be discovered.”

Source: Wichita Eagle.

Winning social entrepreneurship proposals presented to the Prime Minister’s Office

Students in India were invited to contribute to a business plan contest.

The participants in the contest — with ‘Inclusive Growth’ as its underlying theme – had to come up with ideas that would bring about a marked difference to agriculture, rural development and health care and renewable energy.

The winning proposals were presented to “the most well known economist in the country who incidentally happens to be the most powerful policy maker also”. That would be the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh.

Source: The Economic Times.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.