Stillwater Sunrise Rotary Club - Stillwater, Minnesota

On November 16, 2010, we were pleased to have as our guests, Jennifer Starbuch and Katie Hildebrand, who told us of their experiences at Camp Enterprise. With the help of Debbie Drummerhausen, these young ladies were sponsored by our club to attend the camp. They talked about the motivational speakers, including a man that was 97% legally blind, breaking up into groups and forming companies to make a fictitious backpack including marketing, manufacturing etc. and judging who had the best ideas. There were people there from all over the Midwest including someone from Peru. A great experience. They even got some nice looking jackets while attending.

On February 12, 2008, Aaron Mertens spoke to our club about his experience at Camp Enterprise. Camp Enterprise is the opportunity for high school seniors to immerse themselves for three days in understanding the free enterprise system. Presentations are made by business executives and entrepreneurs who share their experiences and answer questions on a variety of fields and interests.  Aaron who was selected by our Rotary Club and his teacher, Debbie Drommerhausen, to attend the Rotary Sponsored Camp Enterprise.

Aaron's father works for 3M, in the lab, and Aaron attends Stillwater Area High School. He is ahead of his class in math and just learned that he has been accepted at North Dakota State Univ.

The camp took place in Buffalo, Minnesota at the Courage Camp. He enjoyed everything and some of the things he enjoyed most included: a neat sweatshirt when they arrived, snack time every 2-3 hours, they never went hungry, inspirational speakers like Paul Carous who has been blind since 20 years old but now is the #1 analyst on the Airline industry and the case study they broke up into teams and were judged afterwards as to quality etc.. His team, where he was the CFO, won the competition, especially since Aaran promised the judges a 25% return on their money. His fictitious resume' of being CFO of Oprah W. helped as well. It was a great time he would highly recommend. It was a group of 50 or so students, very diverse, including an exchange student from Africa.