Meet the Bosco Junior Trades Squad

Here’s an occupational hazard of leading in CORAC: sometimes you write a Go Forth piece encouraging everyone else to hire neighborhood kids for odd jobs, and then you have to actually go do it yourself. You know, for credibility.

So that’s what I did. And it started, appropriately enough, with a cactus.

Why I Wrote This Particular Go Forth Initiative In the First Place

Before I ever hired a single kid, I noticed something that bothered me: the jobs I did as a kid — mowing lawns, shoveling snow, watering plants for neighbors on vacation, walking dogs, washing cars — have quietly disappeared. Not because kids stopped wanting to work, but because we replaced them. Somewhere along the way, “ask the kid next door” turned into “hire the landscaping company,” “book the pet-sitting app,” or “call the snow removal service.” Convenient, sure. But also expensive, impersonal, and it cut out an entire generation from learning what a hard day’s work feels like.

That’s the itch that led to the original Go Forth piece, “Small Hands, Small Jobs, Big Impact”. But an idea on paper is just a theory until somebody tests it. So I did.

The Cactus That Started It All

I asked a middle school girl next door to water our plants while we were out of town for a week. Paid her a set rate per day. She did a great job — better than I expected, honestly, from someone who probably had zero prior plant-watering credentials.

So the next time we traveled, we asked her again. Then it became a monthly thing. Along the way we handed her something bigger: our two dogs. Feeding them, letting them out, occasional walks, hanging out with them at the house. The dogs took to her immediately, which tells you something, because our big labrador and finicky little chihuahua don’t fake enthusiasm the way people often do.

As the work grew, she brought in her younger brother and sister. When schedules got tight, she recruited a few friends too. We paid her a solid daily rate for the dog care, and she paid her crew out of that — meaning a middle schooler was running a small payroll before most kids her age had held a real job at all.

She started this whole thing shy — genuinely quiet, kept to herself. A few months of “you did a great job” and watching her manage a small team later, she’d become noticeably more confident and outgoing. The other kids loved it too. Proverbs 14:23 says “all hard work brings a profit,” and in this case, part of that profit was self-assurance nobody could have taught her in a classroom.

The Part I Didn’t Fully Expect: The Neighbors

We already knew our neighbors — the wave-from-the-driveway, comment-on-the-weather-or-sports kind of knowing. But once the kids started showing up regularly with watering cans and leashes, conversations got longer, warmer, more real.

And then — this is the fun part — other neighbors got a little jealous of our well-fed dogs and thriving plants. They started hiring the same kids for their own odd jobs. One tested idea turned into a genuine neighborhood economy: kids earning honest money doing jobs that, 50 years ago, would have automatically gone to them anyway — instead of to a company with a logo on the truck.

Round Two: Indiana, Snow, and a State Trooper’s Kid

We run the same model at our other house in Indiana, and this round had a secret weapon: my old high school classmate Ken. We’ve known each other over 40 years, since Marian High School, and he currently heads the science department at our alma mater, where he’s taught for four decades. When I called and asked if he knew kids looking for work, he was thrilled — the science teacher equivalent of a kid asked to build a volcano.

First job: shoveling and snow-blowing our driveway, paid per snowfall. This kid didn’t just tolerate snow — he rooted for it the way the locals root for Fighting Irish football. His dad, an Indiana state trooper, dropped him off each time, and eventually I got to know him too — a father genuinely proud his son wanted to earn money instead of just ask for it.

That led to more kids doing more work — yard cleanup, and eventually clearing a half-acre of overgrown woods that hadn’t been touched in decades. One teenager, standing in the middle of it all with a hatchet, said he felt like a pioneer. I told him he wasn’t far off.

Word spread in Indiana just like it did back in Arizona. Other neighbors started hiring the same kids. Ken was so encouraged by the results that he started pitching the idea at school himself, and interest took off from there.

We Even Got a Logo

Somewhere around the time a twelve-year-old was running payroll for her siblings, I decided this operation needed branding. Not because anyone asked for it. Not because a single client — and by “client,” I mean neighbors we’ve known for years — ever once said, “You know what this odd-job arrangement is missing? Visual identity.” I decided it on my own, the way founders of actual companies do not. But hey, I’m a marketing guy.

So the Bosco Junior Trades Squad now has an official logo. It has not appeared on a truck, a hat, a business card, or anything else a normal organization might put a logo on. It exists, as far as I can tell, mostly in my head and occasionally on a piece of scratch paper. But I want you to know it’s there — sharp, professional, entirely unnecessary — quietly legitimizing what is, at its core, a handshake and a fair daily rate for watering plants and putting up with a chihuahua’s attitude problem.

If CORAC ever needs proof that this initiative is being run with the full seriousness and rigor of a Fortune 500 company, I have a logo ready. I just need to get around to putting it on some t-shirts for the kids.

The Bigger Point

This whole experience proved the theory behind the original Go Forth piece, but it also sharpened the “why” for me. This isn’t just about character-building or community — though it’s absolutely both. It’s about reclaiming something we quietly outsourced. The lawn work, the pet care, the snow removal, the odd jobs around the house — these used to be how kids in the neighborhood earned their first dollars and learned their first lessons about responsibility. Somewhere along the way, we handed all of that to professional services and, without meaning to, closed off one of the simplest on-ramps kids had into the working world.

Hiring the kid next door instead of the landscaping company isn’t just cheaper — though it usually is. It’s a small act of reclaiming something we lost. And it costs you nothing but a phone call and a fair wage.

Your Turn

You don’t need a theory paper or a pilot program. You need one job on your list, one kid in your neighborhood, and a willingness to pay them fairly and say thank you like you mean it.

Go write your own field report, and I promise it’ll be more fun than writing up dozens of Go Forth initiatives.