What if the most important thing students learn from running a business has very little to do with profit?

At Santa Fe Christian Schools, that question is shaping something powerful.

Now in their second year working with Seed Tree Group, Santa Fe Christian has built a growing entrepreneurship program under the leadership of Sonia Sturgeon. One of its most visible expressions is The Landing, a student-run coffee shop where students are learning the realities of operating a business: serving customers, managing products, marketing, tracking finances, solving problems, and making decisions that actually matter.

But Sonia has pushed the program beyond simply teaching students how to run a successful enterprise. She is helping them understand what it means to practice redemptive entrepreneurship.

In Sonia’s words, the program is built around “people over profit”—helping students use their God-given gifts and talents to serve the people and communities around them. That means asking a different set of questions. Not simply, How can we grow this business? but Who can this business serve? Where is there a need? How can what we are building create value and contribute to the good of others?

Those questions helped lead Santa Fe Christian into a partnership with Vista Bean Coffee, a missionally minded coffee company connected to growers in the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda.

But this is where the story gets especially interesting.

Santa Fe Christian already had a deep ministry partnership with another community in Uganda, where a K–12 school has been built and coffee is also grown. That community had coffee but needed help processing and exporting it. Vista Bean had the expertise to help.

At the same time, Vista Bean had a dream of eventually helping build a school in the Rwenzori Mountains, where much of its coffee originates. Santa Fe Christian’s existing ministry partners had already done exactly that.

One relationship began creating value for another.

The result is what the school describes as a reciprocal, redemptive relationship between Santa Fe Christian and these two communities in Uganda. Each brings something to the table. Each has something to contribute. Each has something to learn.

That is what makes this story so compelling.

The Landing is no longer simply a place where students practice entrepreneurship. It is becoming a vehicle through which they can see how business, service, ministry, relationships, stewardship, and human flourishing can intersect.

‍This is the heartbeat of redemptive entrepreneurship.

Listen to the full story here

It is not simply adding a Christian message to a business project. It is helping students see that entrepreneurship itself can become a way of participating in the restoration and flourishing of the world around them.

A business can generate revenue, but it can also create opportunity. It can connect people, strengthen communities, solve meaningful problems, and build relationships that otherwise may never have existed.

And at Santa Fe Christian, students are beginning to experience that firsthand.

Students have already helped name a coffee blend combining beans from the two Ugandan regions, and this spring, entrepreneurship students will travel to Uganda. They will visit the existing school, meet the communities connected to the coffee they sell, and then travel to the Rwenzori Mountains, where they will participate in the beginnings of a new school.

Think about the power of that learning experience.

A student can stand behind the counter at The Landing, sell a cup of coffee, understand where that coffee came from, know the people who grew it, and begin to see how the business they operate can contribute to something far larger than themselves.

One of the things I especially appreciate about what Sonia is building is that none of this was fully scripted from the beginning.

Santa Fe Christian started by creating authentic entrepreneurial experiences for students. They built something real, developed relationships, paid attention to opportunities, and allowed one connection to lead to another.

That is entrepreneurial thinking at the program level.

Too often, schools feel pressure to have every piece of an entrepreneurship program figured out before they begin. But entrepreneurship rarely works that way. You start with what you have. You create something of value. You build relationships. You remain open to opportunities. Then you take the next step.

Santa Fe Christian is doing exactly that, and their story raises an important question for every school trying to create meaningful entrepreneurial experiences for students:

‍What if the student business is not the destination, but the platform?

A platform for students to create value and serve others. A platform for relationships. A platform for stewardship. A platform for helping young people understand that business can be about much more than making money.

It can be a way to love people well.

That may be one of the most important things we can teach the next generation of entrepreneurs.

‍Listen to the full story here.