Concord, CA – The First Tee participant, Victoria Leon from Antioch, CA recently attended GK3, the Third Global Knowledge Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  Victoria received one of 100 scholarships awarded from nearly 900 applications worldwide.  At 14 years old, she was the youngest participant selected.  Victoria’s scholarship award paid for her and her mother’s travel, accommodations, meals, and incidental costs.

Victoria was invited to apply for the scholarship through a partnership between Foresters Youth Venture program and The First Tee of Contra Costa.  Participants advanced in The First Tee program are introduced to Youth Venture which assists young people in setting up their ownservice organization to benefit their community.  Foresters awards up to $1,000 grants to participant groups in the program.  Victoria and her brother Vincent received a full grant.

After nine months of planning, Victoria and Vincent launched dimwitnot.com, an on-line tutoring service for peers that provides study halls.  Students receive help with homework, difficult subjects, and network with other on-line students.  Friends and associates of the Victoria and Vincent are peer tutors and earn volunteer and community service hours with their involvement.  In addition, teachers can hold after school office hours or study sessions from their homes. 

At the conference, The Young Entrepreneurs’ Forum brought young social entrepreneurs together from around the world who have set up innovative enterprises that have a double or triple bottom line: they generate financial returns as well as social and/or environmental returns.

The Forum focused on 4 areas in which innovative young social entrepreneurs need support to enable them to harness the full potential of their Information and Communications Technology -enabled social businesses: mentoring, knowledge, networking, and financing.

During the conference Victoria attended sessions on how to do elevator pitches where she had to interest a venture capitalist in her business idea, interview people and critique their ideas, and think of and find 20 ways to create a world of entrepreneurs by 2020.  Victoria learned important lessons on finding funding for enterprises and how participants in other countries face difficult challenges in getting their concepts to reality because of difficulties with the government.

“Attending the GK3 Conference was a wonderful opportunity and I learned a lot of business and social lessons,” stated Victoria.  “I hope to apply the lessons I learned while at the conference to our website and look forward to making our service successful so we can serve more students all over the world and ultimately help them succeed.”

The First Tee is an initiative of the World Golf Foundation. Since its inception in 1997, The First Tee has opened 264 golf-learning facilities and has introduced the Life Skills Education program to over 1.5 million participants and conducts programs in 48 states and 5 other countries. The focus is to give young people of all backgrounds an opportunity to develop, through golf and character education, life-enhancing values such as honesty, responsibility, and sportsmanship.

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To learn more about this article, contact Vic Morris at eastbaygolf@gmail.com.