Observations from this office by Tom Russell “JA is volunteercentric” Ok… I’m not sure that it’s a word, but I like the sound of it. Volunteercentric….. it sums up what JA should be. Over the past decade, JA USA has shifted a lot of their focus to program content. The emphasis has been on adding vocabulary in an attempt to hit more academic standards. The problem with this shift is that the program becomes more teaching and less inspiring. Part of this comes from the belief that class time is becoming more difficult to get, and therefore we need to fill our time with concepts that help the teacher teach. That’s where the fundamental flaw occurs. Teachers teach…. we inspire! As this shift in content has occurred, our volunteers have had a more difficult time creating a great moments with the students. This has been particularly true in high school. Our classroom programs were simply too much teaching, too much vocabulary. The result is that educators are not as quick to invite us back, and the volunteers less excited about returning. So, two years ago we began our volunteercentric shift. We worked to create programs to allow the volunteer to inspire, making them fun, engaging, and most importantly inspirational. This concept worked exceptionally well for work readiness. The STEM Summit gives the volunteer an opportunity to get students excited. Now we are pivoting to financial literacy with our REAL LIFE program. This program, which will be modeled after the STEM Summit, is going to be amazing! Next, we plan to reintroduce the JA Company program for entrepreneurship. This will add on to our JA Titan Challenge. JA is volunteercentric. Our mission is to inspire young people to value their economic future. That’s what we do! Creating an opportunity to show students the importance their education will play in their future is why we do it!
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 13:24:33 +0000