Caguas, Puerto Rico
Young residents of Caguas developed their entrepreneurial skills by participating in the Economy of the Future Project: E-Commerce, offered by the Municipal Alliance of Integrated Services, Inc. (AMSI).
The program, funded by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), provided participants with the training, elements, tools and basic skills necessary to start and operate a small business. Among the entrepreneurial skills they developed were the ability to take initiative, creatively seek out and identify business opportunities, develop budgets and forecast resource needs, and understand capital acquisition options. The young people also prepared their business plans and acquired marketing skills. As a complement, participants obtained information about the labor market, in-demand occupations and career exploration. During the development of the project, coaching was implemented as a tool to support the clarification of life objectives, representing a vital part of the program’s success.
“With an attractive design of this program and the enthusiasm of the participants, we managed to get all the young people to complete their business plan, marketing plan, feasibility study, commercial social networks and online sales platform. E-Commerce…Economy of the Future, is a project that bets on the entrepreneurial skills of our youth, aimed at providing young participants with skills and knowledge that will effectively insert them into the labor market,” said Joaquín Santiago Santos, Executive Administrator of AMSI.
“At AMSI, our mission is to transform the social and economic development of our clients by promoting self-sufficiency. This program is directly focused on maintaining this mission. In the course of this project we met nine life stories, each one of them with different challenges that they have had to face at a young age, however each of these are framed in the desire and will to have a better quality of life,” concluded Santiago Santos.
The youth programs are part of a variety of services offered by AMSI, as a non-profit entity, to youth, adults, veterans and Social Security disability beneficiaries.
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