Teens Show Leadership by Serving their Community

In Durham, North Carolina 56 percent of school-aged children qualify for free and reduced lunch during the school year. However, due to a gap in the system that provides those meals, as many as 15,000 children, adolescents and teens may be without access to regular meals during some or all of the summer.

Enter echoReverb, the teen-led segment of the entrepreneurship support organization ECHO. ECHO, based in Durham, is a community-based organization aiming to create innovation and entrepreneurship. But why leave entrepreneurship just to adults? Through echoReverb teenagers have the opportunity to become entrepreneurs and use their inspiration to make their big ideas become a reality.  

To address the food insecurity for the school-aged children over the summer, echoReverb teens decided they would start two new business ventures for the Durham community: a food truck distribution of meals twice a week, and a weekly teen farmers’ market. Both of these ventures provided fresh produce and healthy shelf-stable options for children and teens in need.  

“These were free meals to anyone who attended,” said Anjanette Miller, CEO and co-founder of ECHO, said. “We know it’s not just school-aged children that go hungry, but the echoReverb students wanted to tackle this one specific gap.”  

With the idea in place, the echoReverb students utilized local resources to find partners to support the venture. Their efforts connected them with the Inter-faith Food Shuttle, a non-profit focused on fighting hunger through local markets and food pantries, and community partners at ReCity Labs, a collaborative network that supports non-profits working towards social change. These partners opened the doors for echoReverb to work with the North Carolina Food Bank and other pantry partners, such as Whole Foods and Food Lion, with the Inter-faith Food Shuttle leading the way as the primary partner in the food distribution.

By the end of summer, the Teen Farmer’s Market and Food Truck Events provided over 3,000 meals to Durham youth and families during four farmer’s market and four food truck events.  This also allowed the students to build partnerships, organize events and show leadership in their communities.  

At the end of the day, Miller hopes that this project inspires young entrepreneurs to take more initiative in business endeavors that could help make the world a better place, regardless of whether they take place under the echoReverb umbrella. “Ask them, ‘What do you need? What would help you?’” Miller said. “We want to stay mission driven, but we also know that teens need other things. It could be academic support, mentorship or life skills. We just want to support them as best we can.”  

Miller ends with, “I would be really excited if this pilot allowed us to iterate and think of other ways to continue to serve.  We need our youth thinking about creative, innovative ways to continue to serve the communities. We hope this program helps to build that thinking.”

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