For young people
Your ideas
deserve a first try.
Washington Consortium gives young people the tools, experiences, and confidence to turn ideas into action.
Explore Programs
What you'll learn
The capabilities
school forgot to list.
BUILD
Turn ideas into action.
- Entrepreneurship
- Problem-solving
- Creativity
- Execution
LEAD
Bring people with you.
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Leadership
- Confidence
NAVIGATE
Understand the world you're operating in.
- Financial literacy
- Decision-making
- Planning
- Resourcefulness
RISE
Keep moving when things don't go as planned.
- Resilience
- Self-awareness
- Well-being
- Learning through failure
Not talents you're born with — skills you practice.
How you'll learn
Not by watching.
By doing.
Every WC experience moves through the same loop — until trying, adjusting, and trying again starts to feel natural.
Start with real frameworks — how ventures work, how money moves, how people are persuaded.
- 01
Learn
Start with real frameworks — how ventures work, how money moves, how people are persuaded.
- 02
Try
Put the idea in front of the world early, while it's still rough and still cheap to change.
- 03
Fail
Discover exactly where the thinking breaks. This is the part most classrooms skip.
- 04
Adapt
Rework the plan with evidence instead of assumption. Decide what to keep and what to cut.
- 05
Build
Make the thing: a project, a venture, a solution a community can actually use.
- 06
Lead
Bring other people with you — and help the next person do the same.
It's a loop, not a ladder. You can enter anywhere, and you'll pass through "Fail" more than once. Everyone does.
What you might build
Start with an idea.
Leave with proof.
- 01
Businesses
Ventures with real customers, real prices, and real lessons — some small, some not.
- 02
Projects
Things you make because they should exist: an event, a tool, a publication, a service.
- 03
Community solutions
Answers to problems you can see around you — in your school, your street, your city.
- 04
Creative ideas
Work that expresses something: art, media, design, stories worth putting into the world.
- 05
New opportunities
Sometimes what you build is a door — a skill, a network, a next step you couldn't see before.
A business is one possible outcome.
It's not the only one.
What failure means here
Your first try
might not work.
Try anyway.
Around here, failure isn't evidence that you don't belong.
It's proof you attempted something real — and it's the fastest way to find out what to do differently. Every WC experience is built to give you a safe place to attempt hard things, miss, adjust, and go again.
The only real failure is never finding out.
Programs
Ready when
you are.
SOCH is our flagship 90-day experiential program — small cohorts, one structured session a week, and a real attempt at a real idea, built and rebuilt inside the ninety days.
Meet the Builders
The first builders are getting started. Their stories are coming soon.