By Brittney Gathen
A program that started in a Teach for America instructor’s classroom as a way to challenge his students to impact their community, has morphed into a program that includes over 2,000 students from 25 different schools in Memphis.
Hardy Farrow, the founder of LITE (Let’s Innovate through Education) Memphis, established his entrepreneurial-based nonprofit after witnessing the challenging lives his students led.
“I realized that the problems my students faced went beyond the confines of my classroom,” Farrow, a former Power City Academy High teacher, said. “There wasn’t one defining moment. It was more of a gradual process where I observed a lot of the different obstacles that my students faced.”
So, in 2013, he launched LITE as a way to challenge students to dream of innovative ways to change their community through entrepreneurial ideas. LITE aims to help African-American and Latino students close the racial wealth gap by becoming entrepreneurs and securing high-wage jobs. The program tackles the three fundamental challenges to starting a business: experience, networks and skills. LITE uses a multi-year model, where it will work with students from the time they’re 17 up until they turn 25.