Our Goals and Mission Statement

The Waynesboro Project will become a non-profit formed for the purpose of creating affordable housing and teaching entrepreneurship to young people who are either juniors or seniors in high school or recently graduated within the last two or three years. To get started, it will be a project sponsored by DBM Enterprises, Inc., a local company here in the Waynesboro/Augusta County area providing computer hardware, software, practice management consulting, and IT services to dentists and lawyers throughout the United States from our current location on top of Afton Mountain since 1994.

The project will be focused on young adults who can not afford to go on to college, or simply don't want to. It is our intention to teach and encourage young men and women how to take advantage of their talents and ideas in an entrepreneurial way instead of resigning themselves to the generally low-paying jobs that most settle for after high school here in the Waynesboro/Augusta County area of Virginia.

It is my hope that we will be able to attract several individuals that we can group together into a "virtual company." We can then teach them to work together with each contributing his or her individual talents and skills to a project that could become a successful endeavor. For example, the group will discuss ideas for a product or service they think would be desirable to enough others to create sales revenues for a successful business. We would teach them how to research the market to check for potential sales and finalize the specs for a product or service that seems like a good candidate for an entrepreneurial adventure.

Then, the individual talents come into play. One person who is a gifted graphic artist could design marketing materials, packaging, etc. Another who is interested in math and accounting could learn to forecast sales and control costs for establishing the financial plan for the project. Another might be interested in computers and the internet and that one could work with the graphic artist to develop a website to promote the project.

The whole concept of the Waynesboro Project would be to help these young people develop their interests and talents and group them together with others having different but complimentary talents to create a synergistic entrepreneurial venture that will hopefully be profitable for them. Our job at The Eaynesboro Project will be to help them develop the necessary knowledge and skills to accomplish that.

It is not our intention to charge these young people for our advice and help, and any projects that are successfully developed will belong to individuals or group that conceived them. If we have enough interested people, we may have more than one group working on projects at the same time. We will also be working with local schools and junior colleges for assistance with specialized classes that may help some participants to acquire and develop specialized skills to meet the requirements of their particular interests and needs.

We will be applying for grants to manage our expenses in delivering these mentoring services, which may include assisting the groups with some startup expenses. Contributions from interested individuals and companies will also be gratefully accepted. Contributions may be either in the form of volunteering mentoring services or cash to be used toward our expenses in helping a group bring their project ideas to reality.