COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE
Community Enterprise is Queens Legacy Lab's youth opportunity and human capital development program. This school year, participants will become part of a continuous learning and opportunity network designed to help them earn money, develop skills, gain work experience, build relationships, and become better positioned for future opportunities. Participants will remain connected through a group chat where Queens Legacy Lab can share opportunities, resources, information, learning experiences, projects, and connections throughout the school year. In its simplest form, we want our young people connected to people who are looking out for them, sharing what they know, and thinking about them when opportunities become available.
COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE + BRAND AMBASSADORS + BUILDERS
The model has three parts that work together. Community Enterprise is the opportunity network. Queens Legacy Lab continuously creates and searches for paid work, event staffing, projects, campaigns, internships, and other experiences for participants. Brand Ambassadors provide an immediate earning pathway by allowing participants to earn from eligible Queens Legacy Lab products and experiences they help promote. Builders are businesses, organizations, professionals, educators, entrepreneurs, and community leaders who can expand the relationships, resources, knowledge, and opportunities available to the group. Queens Legacy Lab connects all three so that the young people are not simply enrolled in a program, but surrounded by a growing network of people and opportunities.
GETTING WORK READY
An important part of Community Enterprise will be making sure participants are prepared to accept paid opportunities when they become available. Queens Legacy Lab will work with participants and families to address the documents and information necessary for employment and payroll. For participants under 18, this includes helping families navigate the process of obtaining New York working papers when required. Participants will also begin learning about payroll, taxes, employment paperwork, and the basic responsibilities that come with earning income.
Our goal is to do this work before an opportunity arrives. If an organization calls looking for event staff, a Builder has a paid project, or Queens Legacy Lab creates work of its own, we do not want paperwork to be the reason one of our young people cannot participate. Getting them work ready is part of putting them in position.
CREATING AND FINDING THE WORK
Queens Legacy Lab will not rely exclusively on existing jobs or internships. We will continuously look for opportunities to staff our own community experiences, support other events, create products our Brand Ambassadors can promote, and develop campaigns that help businesses and organizations accomplish their goals. We can also work with our Builders to identify needs that may be turned into meaningful projects or paid experiences for Community Enterprise participants.
When opportunities become available, our Community Enterprise participants will be among the first people we consider. That is one of the basic ideas behind the program. We are building a group of young people we know, develop, prepare, and can confidently recommend when somebody asks us who is ready.
BRAND AMBASSADORS AND BUILDING CONFIDENCE
Every Community Enterprise participant will also have the opportunity to begin as a Queens Legacy Lab Brand Ambassador. This gives participants an immediate way to practice marketing, communication, sales, relationship building, and basic financial skills while earning a percentage of eligible sales they generate. More importantly, it gives them an opportunity to experience what happens when their own effort produces a measurable result.
This is also an area where family, friends, and the larger community can play an important role. When one of our young people is promoting something, supporting their effort can help them earn, but it can also help build confidence. Getting that first person to respond, making a first sale, or realizing that someone took their recommendation seriously can matter. We want the people around our participants to help give them those early wins when possible, whether that means making a purchase, sharing what they are promoting, or connecting them to someone who may be interested.
As their confidence grows, our job is to help them understand why something worked and how that lesson can be applied again. What begins as selling a Queens Legacy Lab product can become a lesson in communication, marketing, customer behavior, revenue generation, and entrepreneurship.
LEARNING THROUGH REAL EXPERIENCE
The work itself becomes part of the education. Depending on the opportunities available, participants may gain experience in marketing, sales, bookkeeping, customer service, event operations, sports management, program management, communications, data tracking, and partnership development. Rather than creating assignments that simulate these responsibilities, we want participants learning through actual projects where the work has a purpose and their contribution matters.
This is where the human capital development piece becomes important. We want young people to earn money, but we also want each experience to increase what they know and what they are capable of doing next. Over time, participants should be building skills, work history, professional relationships, references, confidence, and stronger résumés. The money matters, but so does what they are becoming more prepared to do because of the experience.
BUILDING THE FUNDING
While we create opportunities with the resources available to us now, Queens Legacy Lab is also actively working to bring additional funding into Community Enterprise. We have people researching funding opportunities and writing grants with the goal of securing resources that can eventually provide participants with stipends for eligible program activities and learning experiences. We are not presenting those stipends as guaranteed funding before the money has been secured, but obtaining that funding is an active part of our work.
At the same time, we are developing partnerships and revenue-producing products, campaigns, and community experiences that can help us create paid opportunities ourselves. As Community Enterprise develops, we will document participation, earnings, skills developed, projects completed, partnerships created, and the opportunities that follow. That evidence will strengthen our ability to pursue larger grants, sponsorships, contracts, and partnerships that can increase what we are able to offer.
THE GOAL
A young person may begin by earning their first money as a Brand Ambassador, then get paid to staff a Queens Legacy Lab event, learn bookkeeping or program management through that experience, work on a campaign for another organization, meet a Builder, and eventually be connected to a larger internship, job, or professional opportunity. Another participant's path may look completely different, and that is okay. Community Enterprise is designed to create multiple ways for young people to move forward.
Our responsibility is to keep building the network around them, prepare them to take advantage of opportunities, and continue looking for ways to help them learn and earn throughout the school year. We may not know today exactly which opportunity will change something for a young person, but we can make sure they have people in their corner who are paying attention.
When we have an opportunity, our people get the first look.