This is how a Fort Worth camp helps prepare kids for a trade and for life
Yecenia Sanchez cranes her neck and flips her hair as her daughter, Emily, 14, practices her new hair styling skills.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Campus Drive United Methodist off of Seminary Road where makeup, mannequin heads, and nail extensions are spread across multiple tables. In one space, parents receive facials from their daughters, in another young boys learn to be barbers and cut the hair of their fathers.
Emily is attending the Next Level Cosmo camp, which help trains youth the skills of cosmetology and builds their self-confidence.
Sanchez and her daughter drive nearly an hour from Lancaster to attend the camp. Sanchez enjoys what the camp provides for her daughter: an experience that can teach her what it takes to be an entrepreneur and the value of working to earn money.
“She doesn’t know what to study or what to do, so this is like a tool that I can give to her so she can use it and know what she wants to do after high school,” Sanchez said.
The camp is run by Chakina Watkins, also known as CC The Great, a name she gave herself out of a healthy self-confidence. She is a hairstylist, business owner, and author. The six week camps for boys and girls ages 8 to 17 were started three years ago to teach children skills involving cosmetology, financial literacy, makeup, and entrepreneurship.
According to a report by Validated Insights, as of 2023 there were 1.5 million students enrolled in trade schools across the United States. The report said the percentage of both teens and adults interested in enrolling in trade school almost doubled during the pandemic.
Watkins helps the young girls and boys not just learn a trade skill, but improve their self-worth and experience personal growth.
“When I was younger, I did not live my fullest or my best life, because I always felt like something was missing, when really everything that I needed, even if I didn’t recognize, was already inside of me,” Watkins said.
Watkins, 41, grew up on the southside of Fort Worth and attended O.D. Wyatt High School. Her mother would take her to the salon every week where they, including her sister, would get their hair done. She fell in love with styling hair and began when she was 12 teaching girls at her church how to do hair.
While attending the University of Houston, Watkins created a nonprofit organization for girls ages 12 to 17 in the community called Classy 7, a name influenced partly by the Bible. Classy refers to knowing your worth, and seven, as in the Bible, represents completeness or perfection. Watkins taught about makeup, nails, entrepreneurship, mental health awareness, financial literacy, social emotional learning, and how to have self-confidence.
She dropped out of the University of Houston and later enrolled at Remington College in North Richland Hills for cosmetology when she was 24. She eventually helped create a cosmetology program at Tarrant County College in 2017.
In 2022, she established the goal of starting a cosmetology camp and in the same year held her first camp at an office building at 2401 Scott Ave. in east Fort Worth. The camp became Next Level Cosmo, which started with about 30 girls led to her group’s first ever children’s hair show. The next few years the camp was held at various locations, including Brewer High School in west Fort Worth. It grew to about 60 girls participating.
This year, the camp moved to Campus Drive United Methodist Church and introduced Next Level Barbering, a camp with the mission of providing hands-on barbering skills, entrepreneurship skills, and personal development for boys and girls. This year only boys are in the program.
Programs for cosmetology and barbering
TyRon Brown is a barber and director of Next Level Barbering, which has 14 boys currently in its program. His daughter participated in the cosmetology program, and he was so impressed with its structure and impact that he wanted to be involved.
Brown, along with Watkins, helped create a curriculum for the barbering camp. They teach each boy the foundations of cutting hair, about the types of haircuts, what it takes to start a business and how to brand themselves, making sure they have the confidence to accomplish anything they put their mind to, Brown said.
“Kids are too often told that they have to go through a system and work for somebody else, when in actuality, they can pay their own way, pay their own future, work for themselves, build businesses and have people working for them,” Brown said.
Dennis Lewis said he took his daughter Samyha to the cosmetology camp because he wanted to show her a profession that can take you anywhere in the world.
“Getting started now, learning the business, learning the trade, and you won’t have to worry about it,” Lewis said.
The camp is funded through $800 tuition payments. Every student receives a scholarship that pays a portion of the tuition, and payment plans are provided.
The program has expanded to 15 schools in the Fort Worth Independent School District that have after-school programs and partners with Fort Worth Public Libraries, which have quarterly courses for youth. The program will be offered internationally in Kuwait in 2026.
Watkins hopes to expand the program to more schools and countries in the future.
“My program is unique in the way in which we teach children how to be superheroes to themselves,” Watkins said.
This story was originally published July 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
