John Zitzner is on a mission to groom the next generation of
entrepreneurs. But Zitzner, a successful entrepreneur who sold his
software firm to Xerox several years ago, doesn’t identify
prospects in the halls of prestigious schools like Case Western
Reserve University, Wharton or Harvard. Rather, he finds protégés
in an unlikely place: inner city Cleveland junior high and high
schools, where poverty is rampant and dropout rates run high.
Zitzner is founder and president of E CITY, a five-year-old nonprofit organization that teaches entrepreneurship to low-income
young people in Cleveland. The group’s innovative 70-hour after-school educational program focuses on 14- to 21-year-olds and is
structured on the belief that kids in the inner city who have mental toughness, street smarts, survival instincts and creativity can
put those traits to productive use if they are given the right direction.
E CITY stands for Entrepreneurship: Connecting, Inspiring and
Teaching Youth. It exposes students to how a business operates
and focuses on each student’s ability to take ownership of his or
her life to be productive, responsible and financially self-sufficient,
Zitzner says. A heavy emphasis is placed on the correlation
between what is learned in the classroom and what is learned in
the real world.
Once accepted into the program, students spend 70 hours, in
two-hour sessions after school, to learn the basics of how to
start a business.
Each student is given a $50 grant to buy products that are
resold for a profit as part of an initial lesson in business operations. Students then work with a mentor to develop a plan for
a new business. At the program’s end, students offer a
PowerPoint presentation about their business idea to a panel of
judges. The judges award cash prizes that the students can use to
advance their ideas.
E CITY’s success led Zitzner and his team to open a sister
organization, E Prep, to a class of 125 sixth-graders. E Prep,
which opened in August 2006, is built around a culture of entrepreneurship and teaches a college preparatory curriculum to sixth-and seventh-graders. The program’s goal is for every student in the
program to graduate from high school and be accepted into at
least one four-year college.
HOW TO REACH: E CITY/E Prep, www.ecitycleveland.com or (216) 881-0735
