U.S. News and World Report
Hey campers, how's your fiscal fitness?
Start-ups are summer's new sport for girls

By Mary Lord

'This is really tough!" groans Ashley Regalia, a high school sophomore from Ukiah, Calif., as she numbly surveys the fabric, foil, and plastic her
counselor has just dumped on the table. It's nearly 9 p.m., traditional time for ghost stories and S'mores. But this is Camp $tart-Up, a crash
course in entrepreneurship that drew 23 teenage girls to the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass., last week , and Ashley is learning about
business plans by creating a new "product" with her team. Their invention, a space-saving hamper-cum-hanger called the Laundry Mate,
doesn't look like much. Yet counselor (and former chief financial officer) Yael Sachs beams at the late night lesson: "When you're an
entrepreneur, you don't stop thinking about the business."

Forget those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Youngsters nationwide are shucking swimsuits for business suits and the chance to improve their
fiscal fitness while still having fun. Six years ago, when Nancy LaPook Diamond cofounded KidsCamps.com, a searchable index of 14,000 summer programs, "business" didn't exist as a category. Today, it's one of the fastest-growing specialties, with 51 camps that focus on the subject. Supply can't keep pace with demand. South African tennis champ Julian Krinsky, who added business camps to his popular sports programs six years ago, had 200 applicants for 54 slots at last month's Wharton School session. "I want [kids] to play business for the rest of their life," he says.

Fueling the boom is widespread concern that far too few U.S. students understand the rules of the game. "Teenagers in general have the
financial savvy of rocks," says Lewis Mandell, the University at Buffalo management school dean. In his studies of adolescent personal-finance
knowledge, Mandell found that only about 1 in 3 understood inflation or interest rates. Just over a quarter knew that entrepreneurs started
businesses. No wonder: Scarcely more than 10 percent of students get any financial lessons in school, says Dara Duguay, executive director of
the Jump$tart Coalition, an economic-literacy advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

No boys. Girls are at special risk. Women tend to live longer, earn less, and retire poorer than men. That's why Joline Godfrey, author of No More
Frogs to Kiss: 99 Ways to Give Economic Power to Girls, founded Independent Means, the firm that launched Camp $tart-Up in 1995. (A
weeklong sister camp, Summer $tock, teaches girls about investing by having them develop imaginary portfolios.) Freed from the distraction of
boys, Godfrey reasoned, girls could contemplate careers in the male bastions of business.

The idea so jazzed Alyce Chasse that she took a break from her California consulting business to teach at the camp. Prince Charming
might "take care of 10 percent of us," she warns the girls, who hail from swank Silicon Valley to inner-city Cleveland and rural Vermont and who
often receive scholarships to cover the $1,600 tuition. "The rest of us are on our own, and we don't want to walk through life as economic
illiterates."

At Camp $tart-Up, the path to financial freedom begins with hands-on activities, from designing fliers to projecting profits from a pushcart
brownie stand. Bull sessions with entrepreneurs like bricklayer Lynn Donahue, a middle-school dropout who founded a multimillion-dollar
construction business, inspire self-confidence, while field trips to the Catherine Hinds Institute, a woman-founded beauty-products business
near Boston, encourage big dreams. The formula clearly clicks with the girls. "I thought it would be all work and no play," says Monica Barr, a
high school junior from Manalapan, N.J., whose passion for browsing record stores generated her team's business plan for Jibba Jabba, a
trendy music cafe. "Here, I learned that everything is possible," says junior counselor Bibi Schweitzer, a college student from Larchmont,
N.Y., who attended four years ago. Among her camp discoveries: how the Internet could broaden the audience for her book on overcoming
homesickness, written at age 13, that she sold via mail order. Power lunch, anyone?