Why Should I?

It is difficult to imagine anyone thinking twice about working with The Challenge Program, Inc. (TCP) once I started sitting in on meetings as an intern and learning about where the business’s money goes. It actually blew my mind finding out about the magic that is TCP and how it can impact a community like all of ours. That’s really everyone’s goal, isn’t it? Impact.

Why should you? I would be a liar to say I didn’t start off with that question myself. It is an interesting concept at first to think about how businesses give money to this program to fund awards for students. Then you sit there a little longer and you listen, you watch, you join and that is when you can see the impact.

Students are hired at a global manufacturing company out of high school. How is that possible? I worry about having a job when I am out of college and these students beat me to it! I should be jealous maybe but how could I when they tell you that they got their dream jobs at the age of 18? A student raised $12,000 for animals in need and when you ask her how she tells you “I just did it.” That is exactly how everyone should think about doing the things they want to do that seems out of reach. You just do it. These students get the drive to do this from TCP and then they also get rewarded for them as well.

Business partners get to do things like hire trained and qualified workers in the local area and call them “great guys.” They do summer internship programs where students are trained inside their organization and get paid based on the quality of their work ethic with hopes they will be able to hire them already trained later on. Yes, these students could come back after college already trained in their workshops, in their kitchens, or on their floor. They are creating jobs in peoples’ backyards that they get the time to know and mold into someone that they would hire.

The glory that is EITC got thrown into my brain and I sometimes start to talk about it with my parents because it left me feeling slightly confused because…accounting, but mostly amazed. “Dad they told me today that some businesses get to choose where their tax money goes.” I go on about how I wish I got to choose where the taxes that I pay go.

So why should you? I think that answer lies behind this quote from a business partner this past May after hiring two students. “I never expected to get this out of The Challenge Program.”