Junior Achievement of Southeastern Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Department of Education and Banking and Securities regularly report that only 15% of school districts in Pennsylvania require a personal finance class to graduate and even less provide quality internships. Our students are not exposed to a variety of career opportunities or given the life concepts necessary to properly finance their futures. We can all agree that the optimal time to teach these skills, like working with money, making the connection between education and careers, and entrepreneurship is when learners are young. Not teaching these concepts to young people now is a failed opportunity that will have a societal cost down the road.

Our JA Career Pathway Initiative delivers hands-on, engaging materials directly to the classroom both in-person and virtually. Delivered by trained volunteers, students gain a memorable experience learning about how to manage money, start a business and exposure to multiple career opportunities, giving them hope and direction for their future. By “pathways,” we mean that JA programs are designed to engage students over multiple touchpoints, from a student’s first day in kindergarten until graduation, preparing them for the transition to post-secondary education and work, and adulthood.

Everything Junior Achievement does is to create a world in which young people have the skillset and mindset to build thriving communities. In the last year, Junior Achievement has pivoted to meet community needs as evidenced by the education gap caused by the pandemic and an increasing inequity in access to economic opportunity. As a result, JA continues to be committed to activities that spur community development through economic mobility; we will work to empower and support more students and families to own their financial future and to increase access and bridge gaps to inclusion. Junior Achievement will continue the foundation started in 2020-21 to become a more strategic education partner by developing scalable, customizable progressive learning experiences that create efficient and effective volunteer engagement, resulting in greater impact. There will be three priority impact measures as part of this strategy.

Learning Experience
Reimagining what experiential student engagement looks like using the latest research/methods and understanding of blended learning model to engage today’s youth.

Community Impact
Build a diverse workforce pipeline that reinforces individual and corporate connections to the community and its needs in ways that will help companies and communities elevate and attract top talent.

Economic Mobility
Activities that spur economic development while seeking to put curriculum and resources into household that otherwise would not have access to education, encouragement, and community mentorship.

Pilot the JA Pathways Model: Experiences over multiple grades preparing students for the transition to post-secondary education and work – building behaviors, skills, and competencies to receive certification that represents their achievements.

Refine a hybrid, synchronous delivery model utilizing volunteers that will be able to pivot to meet the needs of education partners. These experiences will be aligned with state and local curricula requirements and allow for JA to provide a variety of learning experiences based on student’s needs.

Expand “out of classroom” experiences to remove access issues and provide a more equitable experience for the region’s young people. This will include JA Inspire Virtual, JA Connect, JA Company Program, JA Titan, and JA Career Speaker Series.

This will lead to a future state of “Connecting the Drivers for Economic Competiveness”. Today’s complexities require a new approach to integrate all of the factors within education that will position students for opportunity and choice-filled lives.