Estrella Barrera attended Career Tech High School to help identify a business she might be interested in pursuing, and for the time being, at least she’s done that.

Some day, she hopes to own one.

Barrera is among a group of middle- and high school-age students or recent graduates who have taken advantage of the Neighbors For Kids’ Youth Entrepreneurship Program designed to open doors for aspiring youth to get started in the business field.

“My dream is to one day own a business,” said Barrera, who has developed Starlicious Cookies and Treats. So, it’s definitely shown me that you need a lot of effort and help from all the people you can get. It’s showed me how to manage a business, how to actually run a business.”

The second-year program, which utilizes skills and business practices learned from Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE, pronounced nifty) curriculum, is designed to inspire youth from low-income communities to recognize lucrative financial opportunities and plan for successful futures.

To start, Barrera and enterprising young people such as recent Taft High 7-12 graduate Allen Blanchard, who has taken a lead role in the fledgling business, have begun selling hand-crafted pizza by the slice at the Lincoln City Farmers Market, held on Sundays at the Lincoln City Cultural Center. Operating as Meat and Sweet Pizza, the group plans on selling their product at holiday shows and winter markets.

“The pizza is great,” Taft High junior Carl Dooley said. “The cheese pizza is probably the best I’ve ever had because it stretches like 2 or 3 feet. I’m dead serious. It’s really, really good.”

Led by instructor Lucinda Whitacre every Thursday at the NFK’s location at 634 S.E. Highway 101 in Depoe Bay, NFTE education helps young people build skills and unlock their entrepreneurial creativity.

Since 1987, the organization has reached more than 450,000 young people, and now has programs in 18 states and 10 countries. The NFTE books utilized by Whitacre in teaching area youth the advantages of the free enterprise system were purchased through a grant made possible by Oregon Coast Community College.

“What we did this year is we took what we learned in the book and we made a business, which is a pizza stand here at the farmers market,” Whitacre said. “Now were branching out and going to do pizza dough in different flavors.”

With Cajun and roasted garlic, dried tomato and chive flavors to start with, the group already has developed its own packaging and labels and learned U.S. Department of Agriculture rules and standards.

The hope, Whitacre said, is to someday get into local stores and possibly beyond. Blanchard, who oversees a spin-off operation called “Meat and Sweet Pizza Dough Mixes,” sees the opportunity as a chance to do far more than delivering pizza for a chain or a local pizza joint.

“A couple of friends told me about a college course that Neighbors for Kids was doing and I thought it sounded like a good idea so we invested our own money into actually launching our own business,” he said.

With help from OCCC’s grant funding two years ago, participants studied business research and development, financial literacy and writing business plans through real-time, hands-on learning. They’ve utilized the skills to generate income to balance out their expenses. The farmers market culture helps expose them to other fledgling and established business from throughout Oregon.

A small percentage of the profits will go back to the NFK Scholarship Program to help the next group of teens start a business, Whitacre said.

For further information on NFK and its offering of programs, go to www.neighborsforkids.org or call 541-765-8990.