Igniting an Entrepreneurial Flame: Yumtrepreneurs -Food Truck Edition
At Carrollwood Day School, we believe that spark does not disappear. It simply needs room to breathe.
That belief is what inspired Yumtrepreneurs, Lunch Truck Edition, an opportunity created through our Entrepreneurial Institute and brought to our elementary students in grades one through five. In this experience, students step into the role of founders, imagining, designing, and building their own food truck concepts from the ground up. They create business plans, develop menus, plan shopping lists, and bring their ideas to life through hands on execution. What begins as a creative exercise quickly becomes something deeper. Ownership. Confidence. Pride.
For students like Carson G. ’34, whose family is steeped in entrepreneurial tradition, the inspiration is personal. “I want to be like them and feel what it’s like to start something that people like,” he says. Through Yumtrepreneurs, Carson has already begun to understand the steps he will need to take to bring his big plans in the restaurant business to life.
Children are natural explorers and fearless thinkers. Somewhere along the way, that instinct is often replaced with hesitation. Yumtrepreneurs allows that curiosity to ignite while students are still young, before the fear of getting it wrong ever has a chance to take hold. The result is contagious. Their excitement ripples across campus, reminding all of us that creativity thrives when it is trusted and that risk taking can feel joyful.
“Entrepreneurial Spirit? Here is the secret: All kids have it.
We are born with it. We enter this world as natural builders, explorers, risk takers, and dreamers. But along the way, many of us lose that genetic impulse. Whether it is beaten out of us by a system that demands compliance, or quieted by our own fear of failure, we forget how to dream. Yumtrepreneurs is designed to protect that curiosity.”
- Brendan Brennan, Director of Entrepreneurship
The mission of the Entrepreneurship Institute is not to identify a select few future startup founders. It is to prepare every student at Carrollwood Dat School to enter the world with courage, creativity, and heart. We want our students to meet challenges with imagination rather than fear and to see problems as invitations to build something better. Entrepreneurship becomes a lens through which they learn empathy, resilience, and responsibility.
The world our students will inherit will require both courage and kindness. Through experiences like Yumtrepreneurs, they are learning how to build more than businesses. They are learning how to build communities, ideas rooted in purpose, and a belief that even in moments of uncertainty, there is always the possibility of creating something extraordinary.
The entrepreneurial spirit at CDS is alive and well, ready to ignite like fire on a grill.
You can read more about the Entrepreneurial Institute HERE.