Brown undergraduate Lana Nguyen, a member of YEP’s leadership team, said the program is designed to introduce entrepreneurial skills and inspire local students to work toward lives and careers of innovation and impact. Along the way, the ventures conceived in the program are sparking new solutions to challenges such as health care accessibility, affordable housing, substance abuse, pollution and poverty, she said.

“YEP is providing students with that first step,” Nguyen said. “We show representations of women and people of color as entrepreneurs because we want young students to see that it is possible, and that entrepreneurship is a way that people can transform areas of need and use resources available to create a solution to a problem.”

The business ideas presented at this fall’s Pitch Night included seven ventures. Each of them aimed to tackle a community issue — from improving access to public transportation, to addressing food waste reduction and recovery, to creating culturally inclusive, equitable learning environments.

Climb, an app that aggregates resources and support for people aiming to curtail drug use, was the brainchild of Aliya Viamontes — a student at William M. Davies Career and Technical High School who said she was inspired by a family member’s journey in recovery. As part of the high school’s dual enrollment program, the Pawtucket resident is completing her senior year at the Community College of Rhode Island and aspires to work in mental health as a nurse practitioner. Asked to describe YEP in one word, Viamontes replied: “Empowering.”

“On the first day of YEP, I didn’t feel as though I was a person that had influence or power in my community to address a problem or attempt to change it,” Viamontes said. “Now, I feel like I do have the ability to help people and contribute to my community.”

An introduction to entrepreneurship

Since 2019, the Brown students who run YEP have mentored more than 200 Rhode Island students from more than a dozen local public schools. Some alums have gone on to launch their ventures, including a tutoring startup and a cosmetics business, while others are now studying business and entrepreneurship as college students.

And regardless of the commercial successful of their ventures, all YEP participants leave the program with new confidence in themselves and their ideas, and as future entrepreneurs and leaders, attests Anna Deng, an East Greenwich High School student who participated last spring. The high school junior said YEP advanced her interest in business and made her think about her entrepreneurial aspirations not as an elusive idea, but rather an achievable goal.

“During COVID, I found a new passion for business,” Deng said. “I knew I wanted to do it, but I wasn’t sure how to start or go about it. With YEP, they taught us how to build something from the ground up.”

Deng and eight other YEP alums returned this semester to serve as student ambassadors and mentors to the fall cohort. The sense of community at YEP motivated Clarissa Pires, another Davies Career and Technical High School student, to return as an ambassador. The Pawtucket resident plans to major in biochemistry as she heads to college next year and aspires to one day apply to medical school at Brown.

“The program had a big impact on me because you can take the skills from here and apply them to anything,” Pires said. “I enjoyed being here because it didn’t feel like school. It was a great community, and I wanted to come back to help other kids.”

To complement classroom lessons and breakout sessions led by the Brown students who serve as YEP program teachers, the seven-week program features guest speakers, including successful entrepreneurs and local youth program leaders. The high schoolers also learn from Brown student entrepreneurs who have advanced their startup ventures through Nelson Center initiatives like the Breakthrough Lab accelerator program.

This fall, YEP met on Wednesday afternoons through early November, and students were able to participate in other Brown programs and events. Program leaders organized a campus tour for students and their families. This year, YEP leaders included meals, transportation and school supplies as part of the program — for which there is no cost to participants — to better serve students from low-income communities.

Part of the motivation to create YEP was to make Brown more accessible to local high school students, said Will Yang, who led the program for two years and serves now in an advisory role as he prepares to complete his Brown degree in December.

“YEP helps create that bridge for local students to come to campus and learn in our physical space,” Yang said. “We want them to feel that ‘this is my space too.’”

Ending the program on Pitch Night was fitting for Woonsocket teen and Met High School student Zainabou Thiam. The high school junior joined YEP to grow and scale her e-commerce business, Sunu Body, but said learning how to make a successful business pitch was tremendously valuable. This fall, she plans to pitch her business at a young entrepreneur event organized by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

“YEP gave me a lot of opportunities to learn how to pitch and what I can do better,” Thiam said. “I joined YEP because I want to take every opportunity I can to learn about entrepreneurship, and now I feel more prepared to take my business to the next level.”

While YEP’s success started in Providence, the program’s founders — Brown Class of 2021 graduates Leah Lam, Audrey Shapiro and Lucia Winton — have now expanded it with new chapters at Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley. Still, YEP leaders at Brown have plans to further grow the program in Rhode Island by increasing outreach to more schools and communities.

“I think most high school students don’t know that they can interact with Brown,” Nguyen said. “We try to put ourselves out there in the community to bridge that gap and ensure students in the area have access to hearing about Brown and the resources that are available to them.”