With hopes of helping 5,000 Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Lafayette area boys and girls get entrepreneurial experience via lemonade stands, officials gathered downtown this afternoon to launch South Louisiana Lemonade Day. Lemonade Day will take place May 7. In the meantime, organizers are looking for sponsors to help provide interested children with all the materials they need to set up a stand on Lemonade Day. “My first business was a lemonade stand,” says Todd Graves, founder of Raising Cane’s—one of many local sponsors already on board with the initiative, including Business Report. “Doing that taught me some basic things about earning and saving money, and all these years later I have almost 100 lemonade stands across the country through Raising Cane’s.” Mayor Kip Holden officially proclaimed May 7 Lemonade Day in Baton Rouge and bought the first two glasses of lemonade from a group of children at the kickoff event. “Just think, start your children today with a lemonade stand and they can pay their own college tuition,” Holden says.
Lemonade Day was established four years ago by Houston entrepreneur and philanthropist Michael Holthouse. Since then, it’s become the No. 1 outreach and education priority for Holthouse’s nonprofit group, Prepared 4 Life. This is the first year Louisiana is participating in Lemonade Day, along with 27 other cities across the country. The goal is to expand Lemonade Day to 100 cities and have one million stands running on a single day in 2013. For information on how to contribute to South Louisiana Lemonade Day, click here. —Steve Sanoski
