Kids' cash troubles go Lickity Split

The kids were only hoping for a few dollars to buy movie tickets. Now, they have the goodies, too: An everlasting supply of creamy milk chocolate.

It all started two years ago, when eight children knocked on the door of Elaine Bland, a volunteer for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) assigned to help families living in poverty on the Navajo Indian Reservation. The children wanted to earn money doing odd jobs, but Elaine, 55, didn't have enough cash to help all of them.

"Come back tomorrow," she said, "and we'll figure out a way for you to start a business. Then, you can go to as many movies as you'd like."

The next afternoon, the children returned. "We sat down in the living room and started talking about all the different things we could do," recalls Elaine. "I had a Navajo basket hair decoration sitting on the table, and somebody said, 'Hey, this looks just like a lollipop. Why don't we make something like this out of chocolate?' "

Thus began the sweet odyssey of the Lickity Split Chocolate Studio, a business operated by 35 Navajo and Ute children that now pulls in about $20,000 a year in one of the country's most impoverished regions. In Blanding, more than 40 percent of the population lives below poverty level and less than 1 percent of businesses in the county are owned by Native Americans. But that number will likely go up in the future, thanks to Lickity Split.

"Running their own business has given these kids a lot of self-confidence and know-how," says Elaine, who advises the children as Lickity Split's general manager.

Hoping to show that anything is possible with perseverance, Elaine wanted to share a Free Lunch chat after a recent visit to Salt Lake City to receive a small-business award. "Most of these kids now want to go to college and start their own businesses," she says. "That can only help their tribes."

After that first planning session in Elaine's living room, the children spent two months creating glass molds to make Navajo basket lollipops from white and dark chocolate. Lickety-split, they sold their first order to a woman in Colorado, and more kids became interested in joining the sweet after-school venture.

Soon the group was creating other chocolates with a Native American theme: spirit bear and Indian corn lollipops, "four sacred mountains" chocolates and animals such as buffalo, wolves and lambs. The kids are now planning to open a retail store, but the ultimate goal, says Elaine, "is to take this idea to other tribes and have them create their own unique chocolates. This could help a lot of kids save for college, or at the least, buy computers and Internet service for their homes."