After a year collaborating with a non-profit partner on a hands-on high school mentorship program, we knew we had to scale our impact!
In our first year, we guided 25 students through transforming their ideas into reality: building real businesses and AI projects while still in school. The results blew us out of the water so we built the capacity to scale this experience to more people.
Our project-based approach means they don’t just collect certificates. They walk away with practical skills for any career they choose, realistic expectations about success, and the confidence to build a life they’re genuinely excited about.
Today’s students are entering a world transformed by automation, new technologies, and rapidly shifting job markets. Adaptability and entrepreneurial thinking are no longer “nice to have.” That’s what inspired us to develop a program that teaches kids future proof skills like building out ideas that solve real world problems, doing market research and formulating the sales and marketing plans necessary to sell or pitch a plan into reality. Students learn how to dive into industry needs, decide what is worth working on and how to seek the right way to launch either through developing customer personas, building an online communities around their product/service or speaking to the interests investors have when reviewing pitches.
Create Futures helps students build important life skills, through hands-on project based learning, guided mentorship, and real-world exposure to the careers shaping the future.
Market research & identifying real customer needs
Problem-solving frameworks and innovation strategies
Creating a minimum viable product (MVP)
Branding, marketing & content creation
Sales fundamentals & pricing strategy
Pitching and storytelling skills
Financial basics: budgets, revenue models, cost analysis
Building confidence, resilience & adaptive thinking
Using AI to automate (multi-agentic workflows)
Prompt engineering & AI reasoning skills
AI tools for research, writing & product development
Building AI-powered prototypes for real problems
Data literacy & evaluating AI outputs
Understanding AI ethics & responsible use
Designing simple AI-assisted apps or scripts
Systems thinking & future career applications of AI
We wanted students to develop the type of communication, collaboration & leadership experience that would help them in any career they want to pursue.
We believe in hands-on learning so we encourage students to build out their own ideas and guide them through how to do it step-by-step so they know they can replicate the process.
We want students to become problem solvers on a local and national level so we coach them through doing real market research, developing customer personas and communities online.
We don't want students to be afraid of new technology so we talk about how AI is changing the specific careers they are interested in, the new positions created in the last year and what AI can't do.
Our team brings together educators, entrepreneurs, and technologists united by a passion to guide the next generation of students towards success.
Our program brings Create Futures into high schools with a special focus on increasing access to the emerging career pathways and industries. Informed by recent research from Goldman Sachs which highlighted massive unfilled needs across AI, data centers, energy infrastructure, and skilled certificate-based trades, that is driven by national investment and a shortage of trained talent.
The problem we hope to solve: most students don’t know these careers exist or how to prepare for them.
This model ensures that students; whether college-bound, trade-focused, or undecided, gain powerful skills for navigating and succeeding in a rapidly changing world.
You don’t want your child to just be another graduate in the crowd. Join our next cohort to build the future proof skills that will give them edge and the confidence to build their own success. Sign up through our organization for an exclusive discount on our packages!
Our staff is equipped to facilitate in-class activities or guide your staff through teacher’s guides complete with classroom activities and citations to the Florida Benchmarks satisfied by our program. Contact us to tailor a plan that fits your school’s specific needs.
This internship is undoubtedly the highlight of my summer. I can’t recall the last time I’ve been this passionate about something relative to what I want to do in my life. I would go to my parents room after a long day, waiting ecstatically about the new additions I would make to the AI programs that I made. What I have learned from these last 8 weeks is something that I can apply to the field I’m interested in going into upon leaving college. I’ve delved deeper into the world of artificial intelligence and the ways that it can better serve humanity’s continuing growth. I look forward to the opportunities that lie ahead of me thanks to everything from this internship.”
I learned that simple doesn’t equal bad; complex doesn’t equal good. Guerilla marketing and strategies to save money early on were key in my project. I was pleasantly surprised by how often the best solution was the simplest one- boiling each component down to its core and using that.
Understanding value is key. When pricing and budgeting, I realized that the biggest issue was not just the raw cost of materials, but the value of my product to customers.
I made my own prompts and worked through many trials and errors when combining my prompts to finally reach the final one. After running my prompts in Lovable to make my project, I had to edit and change more things such as design or efficiency. I gained feedback from presenting my project and integrated that into the prompt.
“I loved working with Natalia- loved how she made my group feel at ease and not pressured. I wanted to understand how an AI startup environment works and hopefully one day I’ll be the one leading the startup!!”
I created an app and AI companion that bridged immigrant values with western parenting, one step at a time. With age group focused guides, a Cultural Bridge section and a Difficult Discussions scripts simulator I attempted to support communication between immigrant generations favoring traditional parenting practices and their adult children who are choosing modern practices rooted in child psychology.
“The most important thing I learned was knowing how to identify a specific audience based on the problem. When I identified my problem, I was able to focus on tailoring my product specifically towards my target audience – immigrant parents.”
I developed a educational game for kids under 7 that teaches about emotions, their physical sensations and coping skills through activity based cards and videos.
I learned was how important it is to really understand the people you want to help. Building parent personas and conducting research taught me that having great ideas isn’t enough; you have to design with real people in mind. It made me think differently about the importance of listening before I start creating something.
