$500 to support JA of Chicago High School Heroes

Overview

Junior Achievement of Chicago's goal is to serve over 445,000 students throughout twelve Chicago-area counties during the 2013 school year. Last year over 13,000 men and women volunteered their time for JA throughout the Chicago area, reaching 431,281 local students.

JA aims to provide experiences that introduce young people to JA's three pillars of success - financial literacy, work readiness, and entrepreneurship - engaging students in relevant ways with the free enterprise system, and deeply impacting their values and attitudes toward our global economy. JA pursues this by focusing on the implementation of meaningful experiences for young people associated with key content areas of business, citizenship, economics, entrepreneurship, ethics, character, financial literacy, and work-related life skills. Through our volunteers and their involvement, JA programs teach young people about the economic realities of life and the importance of staying in school, a decision that plays an important role in a child's adulthood success.

Vital to JA of Chicago’s student outreach is the High School Heroes program. The High School Heroes program offers outstanding high school students the opportunity to become positive role models in a neighborhood elementary school by teaching JA programs. The program is a very meaningful leadership opportunity that fosters personal growth and responsibility in the participating high school students. The experience instills community service values, grows confidence in public speaking skills, and helps students stand out in college and job applications.

Project Update

Since our project “$500 to support JA of Chicago High School Heroes” was fully-funded (and received additional funding above the $500 request), we were able to sponsor a group of high school students from Taft High School in Chicago to volunteer with two local elementary classrooms at Garvy Elementary, both schools within the Chicago Public School system. The JA high school heroes were a group of cadets from Taft’s Navy JROTC program. The four participating seniors were dressed in their Navy blues and took to the Garvy 5^th and 7^th grade classrooms to share their knowledge about financial literacy and delivered important messages about the value of staying in school.

The elementary students were thrilled to see the uniformed cadets, and even recognized two of the volunteers as Garvy alums. One 7^th grade girl mentioned, “It was great to see Ms. Aleesa… I know her from my neighborhood. She is a great leader!” The 5^th grade students were engaged in the JA program “JA Our Nation” and studied U.S. business operations and economic issues.  The 7^th grade students participated in the “JA Economics for Success” program, and explored personal finance and students’ education and career options based on their skills, interests, and values.

The Taft NJROTC students demonstrated leadership and composition as they navigated their way through the programs. It was most impressive to see these seniors so at ease with the upper-grade students. Most HSH students only volunteer with students 3^rd grade and younger, but these NJROTC students insisted that they could make the best of the leadership opportunity by volunteering in the upper elementary grades. Taft’s NJROTC instructor stated, “We use the JA in a Day as an opportunity to show middle grade students what high school has to offer them, and hope they’ll continue their education at Taft.”   Thanks to the donors of the Global Giving’s Microproject, JA was able to continue our work in encouraging youth to understand the value of education. We can’t think of a better volunteer source to send the important message of staying in school than those high school students emulating it.

Links:

• Junior Achievement of Chicago website