This article is written by Benton High School EAST students JADE HARVEY and CAMDEN LEWIS. Scroll to the end for more about the EAST Initiative.

Benton High School EAST students, have been working on a project for downtown Benton in order to unite small businesses. 

Their goal in pursuing this project was to create a website that would bring all the businesses together as people rather than places to visit. Currently, they are finishing up with the project by taking pictures and creating the website. The students are planning to finalize the webpage by April, and will give ownership of the website to a downtown Benton official where it will continually be updated. Clara Ehorn, Abby Fritz, Jaydn Ginther, Isabella Chavez, and Luke Hall are in this particular project.

Pictured, left to right: Clara Ehorn, Luke Hall, Josh Robertson (from City Church), Jaydn Ginther, Abby Fritz, and Isabella Chavez.

The students have been able to collaborate with many of the small business owners in downtown Benton. Jennifer Donnor, the owner of The Oil Shop, has contributed the most in their project. She was able to help with contacting the Downtown Benton Business Partnership and received permission to use the group’s funds to produce their website on Squarespace. The students were also able to attend a meeting that was being held in the City Church. Many of the business owners met there to hear their pitch about uniting the downtown businesses together and making them easier to be found on the web.

It’s not finished, but this is what the website looks like in the process. Image provided by Clara Ehorn.

The project started when Clara Ehorn and Jaydn Ginther shared a passion for technology and supporting small businesses. The problem they wanted to solved was that their downtown felt very divided and needed to be brought together as a community. Clara and Jaydn had discussed their project ideas is EAST class when it became time to pick a project to work on. Eventually, the group of two became a group of five when the other students had the same passion for the project.

Pictured, left to right: Luke Hall, Clara Ehorn, and Jaydn Ginther speak about their website project at a meeting of the Downtown Benton Business Partnership. Photo by Isabella Chavez.

All of the group members have contributed in their own way and have gone out of their comfort zones to make phone calls, send emails, and schedule meetings with clients. They have worked in programs like Adobe InDesign, Adobe Lightroom Classic, and Squarespace to complete their project plan for downtown Benton. By working on this project, members of this group have gained a newfound passion for their hometown.

EAST stands for Education Accelerated by Serving and Technology. Read more about the EAST Initiative at www.eastinitiative.org.