Wauconda students head to national business competition

Submitted by Madison Hausherr, Emily Brennan and Haley Proszek, Wauconda High School FBLA

About three months ago, we competed in the Illinois State Future Business Leaders of America competition. FBLA is a nonprofit education association with a quarter million students preparing for careers in business and business-related fields. Students compete in events testing their business knowledge and skills. Top state winners then are eligible to compete for honors at the National Leadership Conference each summer.

Our event was Partnership with Business. The goal of this event was to learn about a business through communication and interaction with the business community.

We partnered with Wauconda restaurant, Bulldog’s Grill, to fulfill the guidelines of this project. We had multiple meetings with co-owner of Bulldog’s Grill Aaron Aggarwal to discuss possible ways to benefit our community. We decided to host a benefit at Bulldog’s Grill in which 20 percent of the money earned on the night of our event would go to help the Wauconda Area Food Pantry.

We could not believe the amount of support we got from citizens from the Wauconda and Island Lake area that came out to benefit the Food Pantry and Wauconda High School FBLA. After the success of our event, we went shopping for the food pantry and bought 96 nonperishable items for the food pantry. This project led us to a first-place finish at the Illinois State Leadership Conference in April. Because of our first-place finish, we advanced to the National Leadership Conference in San Antonio Texas on June 23.

Since then, we have done another benefit at Bulldog’s Grill which was even more successful. We used this event to offset the high cost of nationals for the 23 national qualifiers Wauconda High School had. We implemented promotion techniques from our last benefit to maximize the amount of people who came. Even more people from the community came out to support us the second time. Our event raised enough money to pay for part of the hotels in San Antonio. Aaron was so impressed with the amount of work we did that he doubled the donation. We are very excited to leave for our trip and we thank the community for their involvement in Wauconda High School FBLA.

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