By Amy Meuers, NYLC CEO
When we think about entrepreneurship, we often picture startup founders in Silicon Valley or business students pitching to venture capitalists. But some of the most innovative entrepreneurial thinking is happening in community gardens, mental health workshops, and youth-led social media campaigns across America. Through service-learning, young people are discovering that entrepreneurship isn’t just about building businesses, it’s about identifying real problems and creating sustainable solutions that transform communities.
Service-learning creates the perfect conditions for entrepreneurial thinking to flourish. When students in East Orange, New Jersey, investigated food deserts in their community, they didn’t just write a research paper and move on. The Operation Grow team designed and launched a pop-up community garden in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. They trained local residents on plant care, hosted workshops on nutrition and pollination, and even coordinated a school supply giveaway. This wasn’t just service, it was entrepreneurship in action: identifying an unmet need, developing a solution, building partnerships, and creating a sustainable model that continues to grow.
Similarly, in Hawaii, the Hanai Kaiaulu team spotted an opportunity that connected multiple community challenges. Their Sustainable Saturday program didn’t just address one problem, it tackled waste reduction, food access, and community building simultaneously. By converting over 500 pounds of cardboard waste into mulch and trading it for fresh produce from local farmers, these young entrepreneurs created a circular economy model. They identified resources that others saw as waste and transformed them into community value. That’s the essence of entrepreneurial innovation.
What makes service-learning such a powerful incubator for entrepreneurial skills is that it grounds innovation in authentic human need. The Young Women of Promise team in North Carolina didn’t create Makari’s Garden because it was a class assignment, they created it because they saw seniors in their community struggling with food insecurity. They launched their Sunday Lunch Buddies program because they witnessed unhoused individuals at a local park who needed consistent support. The problems were real, the stakes were high, and the motivation was intrinsic.
As educators, there are many ways we can foster entrepreneurship through service-learning. Here are three to help you get started with your youth today:
Embrace Youth-Inquiry into Problems
Stop assigning service projects. Instead, create space for students to investigate their own communities and identify issues they’re passionate about solving. The Camp Fire Patuxent Area Council team trained 160 youth leaders in mental health support across four schools because the youth recognized this as a critical need. When students own the problem identification process, they develop the entrepreneurial mindset of seeing opportunities where others see only challenges. Give them time to research, interview community members, and analyze data before jumping to solutions.
Require Partnership and Resource Development
True entrepreneurs must build coalitions and leverage resources they don’t control. Require students to identify and pitch partnerships with community organizations, government agencies, or businesses. The students at the Duluth Community School Collaborative worked with state officials, nonprofits, and indigenous community members to create their Summer Transitions Academy. Learning to articulate your vision, negotiate partnerships, and coordinate multiple stakeholders is essential entrepreneurial skill-building. Encourage students to think creatively about resource acquisition, grants, donations, in-kind contributions, or value exchanges like the cardboard-for-produce model.
Design for Sustainability and Scale
Push students beyond one-time events toward sustainable models. Ask: “How will this continue after you graduate? How could this expand to serve more people?” The El Paso Young Women’s Preparatory Network is collecting board games for ongoing distribution and maintaining their community garden as a permanent campus feature. When students think about sustainability, they engage with business model thinking, resource planning, and impact measurement. This is where service-learning becomes entrepreneurship education.
Service-learning isn’t just preparing young people for the future, it’s giving them the chance to be entrepreneurs of community change right now. They’re conducting market research, building partnerships, managing projects, pivoting when needed, and creating solutions that generate real community value. Every garden planted, every workshop facilitated, and every campaign launched is proof that young people don’t need to wait until they’re adults to be innovators and change-makers. They just need educators who believe in their capacity to solve real problems—and the structured freedom that service-learning provides to do exactly that.
