About Our Organization
Our Story
Hello! thanks for being here!
We are Cara & Lina, Co-Founders & Hosts of the South Bay Kidpreneurs. We are local mama's here in the South Bay, who also happen to work as a team in our professional lives as a Pediatric School-Based Occupational Therapist (OTR/L) & Occupational Therapy Assistant (COTA/L) duo!
The SBK was born from the two of us sitting and talking about our daughters Lindley (7), and Tessa (6) and how their sass will one day take over the world.. but in the meantime, we really should create an outlet for them to gear in their creative energy and do something meaningful with it! (As OT's our main goal with all of the students we work with is helping them obtain meaningful, purposeful, and functional goals!) so no different for our own children, right?
Well - here we are today! We have successfully hosted 3 Kidpreneur Fairs! Our first was in December 2021, and our most recent was in November of 2022! We have grown from 30 vendors, to now over 70+ vendors! Our amazing kidpreneurs have been featured on local news stations, as well as on Fox 11's Good Day LA!
We are honored that our Kid-CEO's and their families have encouraged us to continue moving forward with our organization as we learn, scale and grow in order to provide more opportunities for the children (and families) in our community to come together in a meaningful way!
Our vision and drive in this endeavor is to create a safe, inclusive space for children of ALL abilities to come and showcase their talent and creativity! The spirit of entrepreneurship is encouraged and fostered, no idea is too big or too small! The children who participate as vendors will experience learning thru every step of "building a business" from application, creation, product pricing, marketing campaign, booth design, customer service, sales transactions, and customer follow up! No experience is necessary, just a dream and drive and the spirit to learn!
A big thanks also goes out to our husbands Kris & Mike who allow us to "mom-plan" (aka - 7000 tabs open in our heads at once), then show up when we need them to, and help us make our dreams a reality. Lastly, we can't forget to give big thanks to our little boys Liam & Weston who balance their sisters sass with their sweetness and help us center our chi on the daily!
We are so excited to meet you soon,
Your Co-Hosts,
Cara Petrat & Lina Awshee
FAQ's
What is the South Bay Kidpreneurs?
The SBK was founded by 2 mom friends Cara & Lina who wanted to create a fun, educational outlet for their two creative daughters to channel their entreprenuerial spirit! We plan and host events where kidprenuers in the community ages 5-17 can come out and open up their businesses to the public!
Who can participate? Do I need to be experienced?
YOU! if you are 5-17 years of age and have and idea for a business, we welcome you to apply and come vendor! NO experience necessary at all! All we look for is a desire and drive to participate and create something amazing! There is no dream too big or too small and we are here to support you make those dreams a reality!
What makes the SBK Different from other "pop ups"?
We recognize that there are MANY wonderful opportunities out there for the kids in our community! We are often asked why we are different, and here's our thoughts on this...
As the co-founders/co-hosts, we literally pour our hearts and soul into planning our events. While it would be a lot less work for us to find a venue and host your amazing businesses as is... our mama hearts, and OT (we are a school-based Occupational Therapist/Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant duo in our professional lives) just doesn't work like that! We are passionate about promoting independence, and functional activities and we're always thinking about ways to make it all a learning opportunity!
With that said, we consider our events a "program". From start to finish, we have built in many steps for our kidprenuers to complete and learn from. From filling out an application, learning to speak about yourself, planning and executing a marketing campaign, designing a booth, calculating finances/transaction, to providing excellent customer service...our kidpreneurs DO IT ALL! At each step, we provide guidance and clear instructions. We make sure you are set up to succeed, and we're there to help you self-reflect and grow from your experiences!
Sure, the money making is fun and exciting, but our journey is not just about that. We put everything into programming so that when you wrap up your day and reflect on your experience, our hope is that you find yourself having learned lots of new things, and made lots of new friendships!
Is there a cost associated with vendoring?
Yes. Our current cost is $45/Booth (table and chairs included)
While we would LOVE to offer this opportunity cost-free to all of the amazing kidprenuers, we are just two moms doing the best we can. We started off our very first fair in December of 2021 hoping maybe 5 other kids would join our 2 daughters and if 20-50 people came out we would have been thrilled! That fair.. we had 40 vendors participate (we ended up kicking our daughters out because we had SO MANY applicants!) but don't worry, they LOVED shopping and learned a lot from it before they got to vendor themselves in July of 2022.
Long story short, we are THRILLED the community has loved our events and that our vendor-families have continued to ask us to host more fairs.....growing our event means the cost to host it grows as well. With that said, we charge the MINIMUM amount we need to collect to cover our venue fees and the rest of the money required to host the event comes out of our own pockets.
As our fair grows, this will become less sustainable for us, and therefore, we have been working hard towards becoming a not-for-profit organization, as well as securing more sponsorships from the community. We will also be adding a "how you can help" section to our site where you will find ways you can help us continue to plan and run our events for the amazing kidpreneurs!