Confidence, resilience, empathy, a sense of ownership. These are some of the building blocks of leadership critical to young people’s success in the modern age. Leadership has been a throughline of the Mott Foundation’s grantmaking for a century, and preparing young people to lead in their schools and communities has become a hallmark of the Foundation’s work over the past four decades.

There are compelling reasons to engage young people in leading solutions for their communities — it can help them develop 21st century skills, connections with their peers, a sense of purpose, and success in future work and life.

Research shows that young people who participate in service have better attitudes toward school, are more motivated to learn and even score higher in certain content areas on state tests. Both service-learning and entrepreneurship serve as forms of experiential education, which has been shown to promote prosocial behavior and empathy when compared with more traditional learning programs.

YouthBuild: Investing in youth-led community change

From 1986 through 1993, Mott provided nearly $2 million in funding to support the initial replication of the YouthBuild program, a model of youth-led community improvement projects developed first by the Youth Action Program in East Harlem. The program represented a pathway for young people in low-income neighborhoods to organize themselves, develop skills to support future employment and take action to apply classroom knowledge to projects in their communities.

In 1988, YouthBuild USA was founded with grants from the Mott and Ford foundations to scale replication. A decade later, Jon Blyth — then a program officer at Mott — described why the Foundation was interested in working with the Youth Action Program.

“I sensed that YAP was different,” Blyth said. “Young persons were the key to the success or failure of the program. They realized that, through YAP, they were in charge of their own lives — with adult partners who valued their energy, their talents, their real potential for making a difference.”

Soon the success of the YouthBuild model attracted national attention, and in 1992, the federal government committed $40 million toward replicating the program over the next two years. To this day, the Division of Youth Services at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workforce Investment administers the federal YouthBuild program “to strengthen the nation’s workforce and meet industry demands.”

From 2017 to 2025, grants to NYLC and America’s Service Commissions supported the expansion of youth service opportunities at the state and national level through partnerships with the Mott-funded Afterschool Alliance and statewide afterschool networks. The additional capacity led to the creation of a suite of programs to integrate service-learning in and out of schools: training for educators and students to bring service-learning opportunities to their communities, online courses and resources for network staff, and service-learning curriculum for K-12 afterschool programs.

Beginning in 2018, the Mott Foundation awarded a $1 million grant to America’s Promise Alliance to support middle and high school students in leading service projects in their communities. Through APA’s Power of Youth initiative, hundreds of mini-grants were distributed to youth-led efforts, engaging an estimated 33,000 young people and inspiring a similar initiative launched by Allstate focused on racial healing.

One standout project was Teens Helping Seniors, a volunteer delivery service founded by Dhruv, who was a high school junior in Maryland during the COVID-19 pandemic. Featured in a 2020 Mott news story, Dhruv shared, “I could see in my community that many seniors could not get out of their houses during the crisis and had no family around to help them.” Dhruv used his award from APA to pilot local meal delivery for seniors.

From 2015 to 2024, Mott-supported service-learning programs and resources reached thousands of sites and educators nationally and engaged over 1 million young people in service.

Building on decades of lessons learned from the Foundation’s work in microenterprise and its successful role in developing the afterschool field, the Foundation in 2015 launched an exploratory area of work to expand entrepreneurship education for students.

Christopher Stallworth, a program officer at the Mott Foundation from 2013 to 2021, pioneered this area of work. Stallworth led a visit to a Young Entrepreneur Institute program in Northeast Ohio, kicking off a series of partnerships with entrepreneurship education organizations. YEI, VentureLab, Lemonade Day and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship have since worked with the afterschool field to grow opportunities for young people to understand and experience entrepreneurship.

From 2018 to 2022, the Mott Foundation awarded 33 opportunity grants totaling $5 million to continue expanding entrepreneurial programming for young people during their out-of-school time. The Ohio Afterschool Network’s Winter Pitch Challenge, launched amid the pandemic with technical assistance from YEI and VentureLab, encouraged young people to develop and present solutions to health, social and cultural issues.

Cristal Glangchai, founder of VentureLab, explains how its K-12 entrepreneurship education programs center on developing creative, resilient mindsets that empower young people with confidence.

By 2023, 19 state networks were working with 200 partners — including businesses and universities — to connect more than 80,000 young people to entrepreneurial resources like hackathons, pitch competitions and new curricula for afterschool practitioners.

During the same time, the Foundation began connecting schools, businesses, universities and afterschool programs locally to create new learning opportunities and hands-on experiences for young people in Genesee County. These connections gave way to building an entrepreneurial ecosystem that intentionally includes young people, providing them with opportunities like pitch competitions, workshops and mentoring that help them develop their ideas into real-world solutions.

Throughout the first 10-year strategy (2015-2024) to expand entrepreneurial opportunities for young people, more than 900,000 students engaged in Mott-supported entrepreneurship programs. These experiences fostered an entrepreneurial mindset and connected students to mentorship and career pathways within their communities.

Stallworth, whose sudden passing in 2021 was deeply felt, played a critical role in crafting the Foundation’s efforts in youth entrepreneurship both locally and nationally.

“He was ambitious for the work, not for himself,” said Greg Malkin, founder of YEI. “To me, that is a sign of a true leader.”

Developing the mindset for an uncertain future

Helping young people develop the skills they need for the future economy means encouraging creativity, adaptability and a willingness to try and fail — all of these traits coincide with the entrepreneurial spirit.

Nationally, entrepreneurship programs supported by the Mott Foundation offer innovative, experiential learning opportunities in classrooms and afterschool programs across the country, and their reach is growing, exceeding 339,000 students in 2024 alone.

Public-private partnerships also bring communities together to support youth-led ideas. Since 2023, Next Gen HQ and Genesee Intermediate School District have partnered with Amazon and the University of Michigan-Flint, as well as several local sponsors, to host the Next Gen Youth Entrepreneurship Summit. The event unites hundreds of young, ambitious innovators from across Genesee County to share their ideas, connect with mentors and compete in a live entrepreneurship challenge.

Jessie Jones, principal of Red Lantern Consulting, discusses what building youth entrepreneurship ecosystems looks and feels like in Ohio and Michigan.

Building on the success of entrepreneurship programming over the past 10 years, the Mott Million Dollar Challenge in 2026 has engaged thousands of K-12 youth in a national pitch competition with a $1 million prize pool. Students’ proposed solutions tackled business and social issues, bringing together youth-led community service and entrepreneurial ventures and celebrating the power of young people to shape the future.

The evolving ecosystem for young entrepreneurs in Flint and Genesee County has the potential to be replicated across the country, expanding access to hands-on learning experiences for young people. Equipped with an entrepreneurial mindset, young people will create solutions to 21st century challenges and build 21st century skills that will make them successful in a rapidly changing world.