Eagles Landing Middle Student Among Top Five Young Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA) To Compete Nationally
Rebecca Zerbo, a 7th grader from Eagles Landing Middle School, was selected out of her 24-student Boca Chamber YEA! class to compete in the national YEA! Bright Ideas Competition in Rochester this past weekend. Last Thursday, she earned a spot in the Top 5 after competing against 22 other regional YEA! winners from across the country. Then on Friday, our very own Boca Chamber YEA! student impressed the national panel and rose to the top once again. I am extremely excited to announce that Rebecca Zerbo WON the Young Entrepreneurs Academy Saunders Scholar Bright Ideas Competition! She earns a $30,000 scholarship and a trip to our nation’s capital to attend the U.S. Chamber’s Small Business Summit on May 21st to be recognized by business and community leaders from all over the United States.
Rebecca’s business, Positive Pocket, began as an anti-bullying campaign and has now grown to be an award-winning business! Check out her company at www.positivepocket.org and “like” Positive Pocket on Facebook to keep up with her incredible accomplishments! Rebecca’s enthusiasm and dedication, along with that of all of the students in this inaugural class, is a testament to the power and potential of a good idea when combined with a great deal of hard work and support from community volunteers, business leaders and other local entrepreneurs. With this amount of strong leadership and intellectual capital, Boca Raton has just the right fertile soil to support an idea like Positive Pocket and nurture it to national recognition and success.
YEA! was founded in 2004 at the University of Rochester and is a partner with the United States Chamber of Commerce and its Campaign for Free Enterprise. The commitment to this initiative falls in direct alignment with the Chamber’s mission of economic and community development and supports the long-standing spirit of entrepreneurialism that has existed in Boca Raton since the creation of the personal computer at IBM in 1981. We are the first Chamber in the State of Florida to offer this program to our area students in grades 6 through 12.
