(Montreal) Nearly 8,000 young people from across Quebec took part on Saturday in The Big Day for Small Entrepreneurs. Jewellery, food or service kiosks, children aged 5 to 17 are invited to be creative and develop their entrepreneurial spirit.
A map available on the event website lists all of the small businesses that have registered for the day. Some young people sell their products in front of their homes, while others take part in a market organized especially for the occasion in their municipality.
Laval, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières and Quebec are just some of the many cities where the event takes place.
“When we started the project 10 years ago we expected there to be a lot of lemonade stands, but that’s not the case at all. Children are extremely creative,” says Mathieu Ouellet, co-founder of La grande Journée des petits entrepreneurs.
He says that young people offer their services to wash bikes, and that others have set up last year a “course of ninjas”, where the participants had to overcome various obstacles.
“What we want is for the children to use their passion to create a business, then for it to be festive, for the family, for them to have a positive experience of entrepreneurship”, explains the man who developed his interest in entrepreneurship from the age of eight.
Mr. Ouellet indicates that the objective of this day is not to transform young people into entrepreneurs.
“The objective is not necessarily that all the participants become entrepreneurs, it is above all that we want them to go through an entrepreneurship process, and that they develop entrepreneurial qualities, he says. We talk about creativity, sense of responsibility, resourcefulness, autonomy, resilience, and so on. »
Each year, a survey is offered to the parents of the young people who took part in the event. And what emerges is the pride of the children who were entrepreneurs for a day, says Mr. Ouellet.
Last year, 4,000 small entrepreneurs took part in the event.
This dispatch was produced with financial assistance from the Meta Exchange and The Canadian Press for News.