July 2019 Cover Story: From Learning to Earning

On any given school day, 200 employees roam a Tempe cityscape, hard at work. There are doctors and marketing professionals, TV producers and bank tellers, folks manning the counter at Cane’s. Only they aren’t your typical workforce. They’re fourth through sixth graders at BizTown, the pint-sized workplace at Junior Achievement of Arizona.

The program teaches students how an economy works, their role as both workers and consumers, and what it’s like to be contributing members of society for a day. But it’s a lot more than fun and games.

“We are teaching financial literacy, entrepreneurship, work readiness and about the flow of goods and services,” said Katherine Kemmeries Cecala, the CEO of Junior Achievement of Arizona.

Cecala knows a thing or two about these topics. An industrial engineer and lawyer by training, she holds an MBA and has served as chief operating officer of Valley of the Sun United Way and interim CEO of Friendly House. But when she learned about the number of kids JA’s programs serve, she knew it was the perfect place to leave a mark on the next generation. “I was just delighted to become part of it,” she said about joining the nonprofit nearly four years ago.

JA serves more than 80,000 K-12 students in Arizona each year, giving them the skills they need to manage money, succeed in the workplace and be problem solvers in adulthood.

“The number-one thing that most businesses say is missing is critical thinking,” Cecala said. “They say, ‘We can’t find kids to hire.'”

That’s where JA steps in.

The BizTown workday was underway for one 10-year-old boy, who was serving in the role of CEO at Wells Fargo when the student working as his chief financial officer was sick. After a momentary panic, he tapped a teller and trained her for the job. “Now, that person isn’t as skilled as the other student who had been working within the class, so he’s helping train her as he goes. They’re short-staffed, so they get backed up with people in the bank,” Cecala explained. “So that CEO goes and fills in and starts to create some efficiencies. Ten years from now, when he’s at work and has a problem, he can say, ‘I’ve done this. I know what I need to do.'”

 Indeed, research shows that kids in Junior Achievement have 34 percent higher critical thinking skills than their peers who don’t get JA training. Not only that, JA students are 30 percent more likely to get a bachelor’s degree and 67 percent more likely to get a master’s.

Why? JA helps kids connect the dots between training, financial literacy and success. The organization partners with about 400 schools statewide to provide more than 20 classroom-or simulation-based programs to primarily low-income students each year.

The curriculum is created by educational experts at the national level, but it’s delivered by nearly 8,000 volunteer mentors throughout Arizona. When they go into the classroom, they talk about their lives and careers, often exposing kids to jobs that they never knew existed.

“We try to make sure we have as diverse a volunteer pool as possible so that we can better match the kids,” Cecala said. “We have volunteers, as well as people on our board, who were in extreme poverty or homeless and managed to pull themselves out. They can give that history of, ‘I once was like this, and this is what I was able to do.'”

But it’s not enough to hear the stories and receive the lessons. Students must experience them, too. Each year, JA Finance Park helps some 4,000 junior high and high school students learn about personal budgeting and how to navigate the financial waters of the future. In real-life simulations, they are randomly assigned jobs, salaries, children, spouses, and other criteria from which they have to budget their lives and make choices. Where will they live? What will they drive? How will they pay for insurance, childcare, and vacation? It is good that nowadays students are able to access online help from people like