Newton Community High School Junior Lilly Kessler is one of seven students involved in CEO this year, and her business project for the course is making and selling candied pecans, a business she named ‘Platinum Pecans.’ Supporting local businesses is important to Lilly, so she sources her pecans locally from Deter’s Pecans in Sigel, Illinois. She purchases them halfcracked, then goes through the process of removing the shells, cleaning the pecans, and dressing them with her choice of dry ingredients before baking. We won’t give away her full process or recipe here, but it sounded delicious. She then sells the pecans in her community, as well as marketing her sweet treats on Facebook for locals outside her immediate area.

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Lilly initially joined the CEO program to help her figure out the opportunities available to her in the future, and to narrow down her interests. But she soon learned how much she enjoyed the chance to get to know the members of her community on a more personal level, which she feels has been her greatest takeaway. “Meeting people in the community, so many people I see out when I’m around in town, … I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen them before, I know them,’ … [and] to have a relationship with them [is the most valuable],” she said.

 

A lifelong native of Newton, Lilly feels that her community is special because of the ‘hometown feel’ it offers. “Everybody knows everybody. That is something that really stands out to me, and just … [the] connection everyone has with each other,” she said. One thing about the Jasper County community she finds important is that there has always been a sense of ‘don’t forget where you came from’ mentality in the community. So often there is the idea that, when coming from a small town, a person only feels successful when they’ve left home and made a life somewhere else. But Lilly feels that Jasper County’s hometown, remember-your-roots, attitude is altogether different from that stereotype. “I think that’s important to me because it doesn’t make me afraid if I want to come back and live here. That it’s a good place to live,” she explained.

 

At this juncture, looking ahead to the future, Lilly is planning a career in nursing. “I’ve kind of always [liked] the setting of being in a hospital, in the medical field, so I think I’m definitely gearing towards medical,” she said. Due to her involvement with the CEO program, and conflicting class schedules, Lilly wasn’t able to take any of the Health Occupations courses this year, but said she’s signed up for them next year, and feels she will be well prepared for her future education in medicine when she graduates.

 

Lilly is also very involved in sports, playing volleyball, basketball, and softball. One talent she is very passionate about is playing piano, something she said many may not know about her. “I started taking piano lessons when I was in about kindergarten, about six years old. I continued that until I was about a sophomore in high school,” she said. Being involved in sports and other activities, along with piano lessons, proved to be too hectic a schedule, so she no longer takes lessons. “But it’s always been a passion of mine. I play at church. … I like playing classic church music or sheet music. I’m Catholic, so I like pulling out stuff … that I’ve grown up listening to at church,” she said.

 

If she could offer her younger self any guidance for the journey ahead, Lilly said it would be, “Definitely to never give up. I would say there’s a lot of hard things that I do, I’m very involved. So just … never giving up, keep going even though it’s hard. Like, it’s worth it, it is so worth it in the long run. I can see it happening now, so many things that I realized are worth it, even when I didn’t want to do them.”