OK2Grow: Creating Tomorrow’s Economic Workforce
By EMILY RAMSEY
Managing Editor
SUPPORTING EDUCATION: OK2Grow Co-Founders Lynda Wingo, left, and Jerry Holder stand with OK2Grow State Director Stephanie Cameron. OK2Grow was created to aid local small businesses and high school students in creating and promoting local job and career opportunities.
EMILY RAMSEY for GTR Newspapers
OK2Grow was created to address needs in the community related to high school completion, career awareness and small business.
When the late Larry Mocha first originated the idea for OK2Grow, it came about due to the unsettlingly high drop-out percentages at area high schools.
Mocha and his partners Lynda Wingo and Jerry Holder, all of them small business owners, banded together in 2011 to create a nonprofit organization that aided small businesses in locating qualified employees out of high school.
Stephanie Cameron, OK2Grow state director, joined Mocha’s company APSCO and OK2Grow in August 2012 as the nonprofit was expanding its focus to better inform and educate students and educators on local career opportunities.
OK2Grow’s three main focus areas are youth entrepreneurship, career awareness and manufacturing promotion.
Ashton Greer, who graduated in May from Owasso High School, is one of 10 scholarship recipients of OK2Grow’s Scholarships to Success program for the 2015-16 school year. The scholarship program is open to all Oklahoma high school seniors who own their own business.
Greer attended Tulsa Tech’s culinary arts program during her junior and senior years. In January 2015, she started Sugarbuttons Homemade Confections as a way to make money and investigate her interest in opening a bakery in the future.
While she already knew how to bake cookies, what she needed to learn was cookie decorating, which she learned from YouTube tutorials.
“I started selling to family, and it grew from there,” Greer says.
When she first started, she sold her cookies in the storefront of a local antique store, but once she created a Facebook business page, the orders started piling in, and she began focusing solely on her online business.
Greer earned a $1,000 scholarship from OK2Grow’s Scholarships to Success program, which she will use to purchase textbooks at Tulsa Community College for her coming freshman year. Greer plans to attend TCC for her first two years before transferring to Oklahoma State University.
OK2Grow’s youth entrepreneurship arm also hosts workshops and after-school programs that teach entrepreneurship and business subjects to students.
The nonprofit’s second interest area is career awareness: providing career exposure in order to help students find their potential career path. This is done through career fairs, tours of local businesses, panels conducted with industry leaders and internships.
“It helps to encourage students to have a passion about something if they see the relevance in what they are learning,” Cameron says. She adds that students aren’t the only ones receiving this education. Teachers and administrators receive this information also in order to better inform students of available careers and career expectations, which help schools to provide a culture of career pathways.
OK2Grow’s third interest area is promoting the manufacturing industry through the national initiative Dream It Do It.
OK2Grow offers manufacturing training programs to high school students, such as Union High School’s Certified Production Technician (CPT) program. Through this program, students enroll in a paid internship and receive industry-recognized certification. The program began at both Union High School and Sand Springs High School in 2014.
Area students can also get involved with the Craftsman Society, a group of early career manufacturing employees.
“These individuals show students the success possible in the manufacturing industry,” says Cameron.
Updated 06-27-2016
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