Case study
Xbox Game Camp Minneapolis
A global games-industry programme brought into the partnership, with the first fully funded cohort in its history.
The problem
A global Xbox development programme and a national foundation network that had never been connected, a games-industry leadership transition in the middle of planning, and a cohort of young adults who could not afford to trade a summer's income for a career programme.
My mandate
I led the Consumer Channel Sales side: the partnership architecture, the funding case, and the first retail extension in the programme's history. Xbox Game Camp owned the curriculum; the Best Buy Foundation owned the cohort.
The call
Solve the real barrier, which was money, not talent: secure a Best Buy Foundation stipend covering all twelve weeks, so no participant had to choose between a summer job and a possible career in games.
What changed
Sources: FY26 Gold Club nomination; Best Buy Corporate News, 15 April 2026.
What survived the handover
The programme itself. The twelve-week mentorship launched in June 2026 and runs beyond my handover, with the September showcase in the team's hands and a reusable compliance framework for future retail and foundation activations.
Xbox Game Camp is a global programme: cohorts of aspiring game creators, mentored by people inside the industry, with alumni around the world. It began in Minneapolis in 2019, and its camps have run worldwide since 2020. The Best Buy Foundation’s Teen Tech Center network is headquartered in the same city. Nobody had connected the two.
Making the connection was the easy half. The design question was harder: the young adults the Foundation serves often cannot spend twelve unpaid weeks on career development, however good the programme. So the version we built answered that directly. Participants, drawn from Twin Cities Teen Tech Centers and aged 18 to 19, receive a Best Buy Foundation stipend for the full twelve weeks, the first fully funded cohort in the programme’s six-year history. They build a game prototype, present it to Xbox at Best Buy’s corporate campus, and keep full ownership of what they make.
Delivery ran through a games-industry leadership transition that arrived in the middle of planning. We replanned to a clean announcement in April without slipping the June launch or the September showcase, and I built the first physical retail extension in the programme’s history, from a bestbuy.com landing page to in-store screens, under a compliance framework agreed with legal that future activations can reuse.
Both partners announced it in their own newsrooms in April 2026. The first cohort presents their prototypes to Xbox in September, and the programme is running without me, which was the point: I handed over the architecture in the summer of 2026, and the team is delivering it.