VentureLab
VentureLab
VentureLab Cultivates SEL Skills Through Entrepreneurial Learning and Career Exploration
In a bold effort to close the education opportunity gap, the national nonprofit VentureLab helps students build vital social-emotional learning (SEL) skills through immersive real-world experiences that spark both entrepreneurship and passion-driven career exploration. With a focus on underrepresented youth and young women, the program enables students to build confidence, find their voice, and refine problem-solving skills that empower them to dream big.
With support from All Points North Foundation, VentureLab will provide professional development to educators to implement two of its nationally recognized programs for middle schools: Idea to Pitch and Career Exploration. Educators will receive customized training and coaching along with resources in English and Spanish, including handouts, videos, student workbooks, and impact tools that assess SEL growth in areas such as self-confidence, social awareness, and agency. The organization’s ESTEAM framework – which combines Entrepreneurship, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math – prepares students to build confidence, creativity, and resilience to dream big and design their futures.
The grant will enable VentureLab to reach middle school students throughout the school year in Missouri, Texas, Ohio, Hawai’i, and Utah. Over six-week experiences, students will explore identity, develop empathy, and take ownership of their learning by designing solutions and exploring their passions and career interests that matter the most to them. These experiences serve as powerful vehicles for students to practice 21st century skills rooted in foundational SEL competencies like goal setting, social awareness and relationship building, responsible decision-making, and perseverance in dynamic learning environments.
While traditional classrooms tend to silo learning by subject, the world at large operates in an interdisciplinary model. The training also integrates the VentureLab Mindsets – curiosity, creativity, courage, resourcefulness, persistence, empathy, adaptability, optimism, collaboration, and opportunity seeking – empowering teachers to nurture a new generation of problem solvers and changemakers. The evidence-based curriculum is aligned with CASEL’s core SEL competencies, Next Generation Science Standards, and 21st-century skills, giving students authentic opportunities to build emotional intelligence, express creativity, and work collaboratively – while building the mindsets and skills that fuel innovation and lifelong learning.
By embedding SEL into every lesson, VentureLab fosters learning environments where students take healthy risks, embrace failure, and develop growth mindsets. Educators trained through this initiative will play a critical role in helping students not only launch bold ideas and explore careers – but also become emotionally intelligent leaders equipped to navigate and shape a rapidly changing world.
For more information: www.venturelab.org
Photo credit: VentureLab
All Points North Foundation provides grants for U.S.-based projects and initiatives that support our priorities: improving public middle school education and teacher training, and implementing effective solar programs and/or projects.
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