Looking forward to Davos – Amy Rosen

Amy Rosen is guest blogging for the Forum. She is President and Chief Executive Officer, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), USA and is a participant at this years Annual Meeting

Twitter: @arosennfte

I am excited to be making my first trip to Davos and the WEF. Visiting the hotel where Thomas Mann wrote Magic Mountain is itself a special treat for me, and doing so at a meeting dedicated to making the world a better place is my kind of idea of a good time.
  
As I look over a very full program of interesting discussions and dozens of invitations, I wonder how I can possibly make the most of this amazing opportunity.  Beyond packing comfortable snow boots, I am not sure how to be everywhere I want to be at once! Coming to Davos with a mission to grease the skids for a much needed entrepreneurship education imperative, there will be no rest for the weary.
 
As the leader of a global NGO, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), I come representing youth from low income communities around the world, who when given the chance to learn the basics of business, through a highly experiential curriculum- begin to think like entrepreneurs and translate street smarts to biz smarts.
 
I have no doubt that if I can get smarter about how to spread this work through the convergence of the new economic realities and the unique opportunities of the digital world, we can quickly reach beyond the 375,000 young people fortunate enough to have had an opportunity to change their lives through this highly effective program, to 3.75 million. Instead of having a world with 1200 Certified Entrepreneurship Teachers, we can have a world with 1.2 million Certified Entrepreneurship Teachers connected and talking to each other as they coach millions of young people through the creation of their futures full of opportunity. What I believe I can find in Davos next week, is the chance to learn from the visionaries of so many successful enterprises.
 
Together we can knit the connective tissue to make our current  “network” into a movement which will jumpstart the world of opportunity that these young people deserve, and our economy need.
 
So with those modest goals, I sit here sorting through more invitations, instructions, and program notes, wondering how NFTE, our founder Steve Mariotti, and I got so lucky to participate alongside so many brilliant thinkers and leaders,  and look down again at my feet, wondering  how I can make my snow boots into running shoes so I can track down Mark Z., Arianna and Sergey!