By
Diane Winston
Anmonique Lothian

ASPIRE NEWS

ASPIRE Girls Attend An Income of Her Own!™ Conference

Five Westhill High School ASPIRE students, Fatme Ayoub, Melissa Turnier, (both 10th grade), Sophia Jean, Karen Lopez (both 11th grade) and Anmonique Lothian (12th grade) attended a conference on October 17th that promoted teen entrepreneurship.

The conference, An Income of Her Own!", was attended by girls between the ages of 12 and 16 who are interested in business or curious about career choices. Sponsored by Strategies for Wealth Creation and Protection, Guardian Life Insurance Company and Mercy College, the conference was facilitated by two representatives of Independent Means, Inc., and attended by 80 girls and 20 businesswomen.

During the first half of this daylong conference, a speaker presented the topic, What is Economic Power for Teen Women? and attendees saw the video, Women Who Dare, about three successful female entrepreneurs. The highlight of the day for most girls was the Product-in-a-Box® game, in which peer teams were challenged to create a product using only the contents of a box, and to develop and present their business plan for the product to the conference participants. Students demonstrated entrepreneurial creativity while learning cooperation, team building, the components of a business plan and some basic language of business, all in the name of fun! Claudia Obas, a Westhill High School Guidance Counselor and school representative for the ASPIRE Program, and Diane Winston, WIM President Elect and ASPIRE Co-chair, participated as conference facilitators.

From the Perspective of an ASPIRE Senior I really enjoyed participating in the Teen Entrepreneurial Conference in October. Westhill High School was the only Connecticut school of the 12 schools that participated. We, as students, had the opportunity to meet many new people and to talk one on one with different entrepreneurs about different aspects of their jobs.

Personally, the conference gave me a chance to learn more about my particular career field of interest and even look at it from a different perspective: owning it.

The part of the program that I enjoyed the most was the Hot Company! board game. In this game, we were faced with situations that could occur in the real world. I also enjoyed our interviews with so many women in business and had fun during the segment of the conference called, What's My Business?, when we had to guess what they did for a living by asking questions about their careers.

Thank you WIM for sponsoring the ASPIRE Program and making opportunities like this available to me and the other girls in the program.

Anmonique Lothian, Class of 2002