Steve Mariotti, a teacher in some of New York’s roughest schools who discovered that his bored, disrespectful students suddenly tuned in when he talked about running a business, inspiring him to create an organization that has taught business skills to more than 1 million at-risk youths in the U.S. and abroad, died on Oct. 20 in Union City, N.J. He was 71.
His death, at the home of a friend with whom he was living, was caused by a heart attack, according to the nonprofit organization that Mr. Mariotti founded in 1987, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, or NFTE.
Mr. Mariotti believed that imparting business basics to poor, mostly minority students who saw no connection between school and the quality of their lives could help them develop an interest in math and writing, improve their behavior, and instill a belief in themselves and a hope for the future.
The organization, which he started on his modest teacher’s salary, now has a $12 million budget, oversees programs in 28 states and 27 countries, and reports that 80 percent of its alumni have earned or are earning college degrees or professional certificates.
Jasmine Lawrence Campbell, an alumna of a NFTE course, who founded EDEN BodyWorks, a beauty products line sold in Wal-Mart, wrote on LinkedIn: “There would be no EDEN BodyWorks without NFTE. I’m so grateful for the organization Steve Mariotti founded that radically changed the course of my life.”
Mr. Mariotti’s own life was changed by an emotionally shattering episode that led him to become a teacher.
In 1981, when he owned a small import-export business in New York, he was mugged by six teenage boys while jogging along the East River. Angry that he had only $10 in his running shorts, the boys punched him, flashed knives and threatened to throw him into the river.
After the attack, Mr. Mariotti was plagued by nightmares and a sense of humiliation. When a therapist diagnosed post-traumatic stress syndrome and advised him that he could conquer it by becoming “a teacher of difficult students in a difficult school,” Mr. Mariotti left his business and began teaching remedial math at Boys and Girls High School, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
His new students mocked him as “Mr. Manicotti” while blasting music in class and dancing on his desk. It was only when he introduced a lesson on how businesses made profits — distributing handfuls of coins for a game in which they pretended to be a shopkeeper and customers — that they began to pay attention.
“Whenever I could tie a lesson to entrepreneurship, I had my students’ rapt attention,” Mr. Mariotti wrote in his memoir, “Goodbye Homeboy: How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement,” published in 2019. “I consistently witnessed angry, disillusioned teenagers light up whenever I explained that entrepreneurship is a viable way for anyone to earn money and create a pathway out of poverty.”
At a second school, Jane Addams Vocational High School in the South Bronx (now Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers), Mr. Mariotti encouraged students to start their own small businesses — braiding hair, for example, or peddling sunglasses bought from wholesalers in Midtown Manhattan.
“I discovered that my low-income students had a natural aptitude for entrepreneurship, born of their stressful lives,” he wrote. “They were comfortable with risk and ambiguity. They were brave and unselfconscious. They were gutsy and resilient, and they were natural salespeople.”
In 1987, when he expanded the in-school program into an all-day venture for the most troubled students, it was profiled by The New York Times and ABC’s “World News Tonight With Peter Jennings.”
The next year, after he left his teaching job, Mr. Mariotti was able to reach 200 students in the New York City area through a workshop. By 1991, his program, now known as NFTE (pronounced “nifty”), had partnered with an organization in Kansas and opened an office in New England, which led to rapid growth. The entrepreneurial curriculum that he and others developed was published by Pearson Education in 2005 as a textbook, “How to Start & Operate a Small Business.”
By 2006, one-third of NFTE’s funding came from the Goldman Sachs Foundation. In 2011, the winners of its national entrepreneurship challenge were welcomed at the White House. The organization’s 25th anniversary was marked by a gala fund-raiser in 2013 at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, sponsored by Mastercard, Ernst & Young, Microsoft and others.
That same year, a study by a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that students who had taken a NFTE course had a higher graduation rate than the national average. They were also more likely to be employed, and one out of five NFTE alumni with jobs were self-employed, compared with the national average of one out of nine people.
Steve John Mariotti was born on Aug. 14, 1953, in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in nearby Flint. His mother, Nancy (Mason) Mariotti, was a special-education teacher; his father, John J. Mariotti, taught industrial engineering at the General Motors Institute.
His maternal grandfather, Lowell B. Mason, was a longtime lawyer for Ayn Rand, the popular author of novels like “Atlas Shrugged” (1957), which lionized entrepreneurs. For years he looked up to her. (The spell was broken after he met her in New York and mentioned that he had attended a gay-rights event; she later wrote to him forbidding further contact because of his support for “the immoral acts of homosexuals,” he wrote in his memoir.)
Dreaming of a career in the auto industry, Mr. Mariotti earned a B.A. in economics as well as an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan, graduating in 1977. He was hired as a financial analyst at Ford Motor Company, but was ultimately fired, he wrote, because of his memos questioning the company’s business in apartheid South Africa. Soon after, he moved to New York, where he started a small business importing artisan-made goods from Jamaica, Kenya and other countries.
He retired as president of NFTE in 2015. He is survived by a brother, Jack.
Years after Mr. Mariotti’s traumatic mugging, one of his assailants walked into an entrepreneurship class he was teaching at Seward Park High School, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The two recognized each another but weren’t sure from where. Then the memory flooded back.
“We shook hands and agreed to let bygones be bygones,” Mr. Mariotti wrote. “He turned out to be a wonderful young man who was working hard to change his life and improve his prospects.”
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