Last night my wife and I joined Steve and Bette Gibson and a room full of other amazing individuals at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City. Steve and Bette have founded the Academy for Creating Enterprise in the Philippines that teaches LDS return missionaries the skills necessary to start, own, and operate a small business. Around 1,000 return missionaries and former mission presidents have passed through the 8 week course; there are now over 1,600 individuals employed through the efforts of those academy graduates.
I came back from my mission to an education, job opportunities, and plenty of food on the table one way or the other. A lot of the elders in Brazil where I served went home to nothing, and that is not an exaggeration. Their homecoming included no income, no educational opportunities (which is why Brazil is not the powerhouse it should be), and typically a sparse to non-exsistent support structure to help get them back on their feet. I have pure admiration and quite a bit of love for the efforts of Steve, Bette, Andy, and Tony. What an amazing organization. You can visit their website at http://www.creatingenterprise.com/.
