About this issue.

Christine Edmond recognized the importance of networking early in life thanks to the Kidpreneurs Conference at our annual Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference. A participant since its inception seven years ago, Christine, 13, says her favorite Kidpreneurs exercise was learning to network. It was a simple class assignment: She and her classmates were given a single sheet of paper with boxes drawn on it. Each box represented a space to write down information gathered from the individuals they networked with. Each student had three minutes or less to write in a box the name and age of the person, where he or she lived, what grade he or she was in, the name of his or her school, and any other information the student could gather. When the assignment was over, Christine was excited to discover that her classmates were from all over the United States.

"I like networking," explains Christine, who is a daughter of BLACK ENTERPRISE Editor-in-Chief Alfred A. Edmond Jr. "It's definitely an entrepreneurial skill. In order to develop a business, you have to know people to get help. Networking is a skill that has helped me to become much more social."

Teaching these types of skills is a key element of principle No. 6 of our Declaration of Financial Empowerment: to teach business and financial principles to my children. This principle captures the spirit of our annual Kidpreneurs Conference, a day camp held during the Entrepreneurs Conference that teaches basic business skills to young people ages 7 to 17, with additional programs for children as young as 4. For years, we at BE have reached out to our youth to inspire them to view entrepreneurship as an exciting option, to develop a basic understanding of budgetary principles and financial matters, and to be ambitious in their career goals. In the past, we published two separate newsletters titled Black Enterprises for Teens and KidpreneursNews. Through those pages we were training tomorrow's leaders.

Today, inspired by the enthusiastic responses of readers to those limited distribution publications, we're taking that concept one step further by combining our efforts and rolling them into our latest venture--Black Enterprises Teenpreneur a new section now available to every reader and subscriber of BE beginning with this issue. We urge you to find a young person within your sphere of influence-your neighborhood, church, or local school--and hand him or her this easily removable edition of Teenpreneur. Whether our young people end up on Wall Street (like the men and women in our cover story, this issue), as multimillionaire investors, behind a mahogany desk in the corner office, or starting their own business, we promise Teenpreneur will help them achieve their goals and live their dreams.

"As kids, we have dreams to be much more prosperous and to go further in life than our parents and our grandparents," says Christine. "Black Enterprises Teenpreneur magazine will be great because there aren't many magazines that actually influence kids or try to help them build their way to success in entrepreneurship. I like to read teen magazines, but they don't talk about how you can develop your own business and make your own money. Teenpreneur addresses that. For example, if you like working with cameras then [it] will show you how to start your own business as a photographer."

We urge you not to let this issue (or any issue) of Teenpreneur go to waste, even if there are no teenagers in your household. Let's make sure each and every copy makes it, into the hands of a young person. Christine's father Edmond, says: "We can't afford to wait until our young people are old enough for BE to talk to them about careers, money, and business ownership. They need our guidance and encouragement for the positive things they are doing today. We have to begin preparing the next generation now."

The Editors