Junior Achievement of OKI Partners
644 Linn Street, Suite 1024
Cincinnati, OH 45203
Pathways to Financial Literacy and Career Readiness
Grant Application:
The GenJA Project: Pathways to Financial Literacy and Career Readiness ignites and empowers a generation of students (K-12) by offering a clear and coordinated strategy for financial literacy, career awareness, and work readiness enlisting evidence-based best practices in the field of financial education. The Pathways to Financial literacy model evolves developmentally using a continuum of “building blocks”. Employing traditional classroom programs led by community and corporate volunteers, the interactive Inspire to Hire career expo, the Virtual Career Exploration Fairs supported by over 100 career videos created by the staff of local companies for K-8th graders, the competitive Stock Market Challenge, and the new Financial Literacy curriculum meet the needs of Greater Cincinnati’s students as they build their financial decision-making knowledge and skills helping our young people to make informed financial choices throughout their lives.
Grant Evaluation Report:
Our goals for students participating in JA programming are to gain the skills that lead to self-sufficiency by focusing on important concepts related to financial literacy, workforce readiness, and entrepreneurship. JA Programs: (1) expose students to career pathways and teach them the skills needed to fill the talent pipeline relevant to our region’s established and future economy, (2) nurture educated, proactive attitudes toward personal finances in students that will support their financial stability as they progress through various life stages, and (3) teach a realistic understanding of the benefits of post-secondary education to their lifelong earning potential.
JA is committed to ongoing evaluation and quality assurance of all programs. On an annual basis, we track the total number of student participants, the number of program hours completed, the number of volunteer contact hours, teachers and number of classrooms served. Additionally, JA utilizes program evaluation tools for specific JA programs, and surveys both teachers and volunteers annually. This provides insight into the relevancy of the curriculum for classroom learning, stakeholder experience, and suggested improvements to continually enhance our mission.
Junior Achievement promotes financial stability and recovery through financial education. It is a cause that benefits all members of the community, by serving at-risk youth with information vital to their success, and consequently the growth and success of the Greater Cincinnati area. The young people we reach often share other characteristics that impact their status as well. Often they emanate from single-parent homes and, frequently, that parent is working multiple jobs to manage the family's finances. Sometimes they feel strong pressure to get out of school and find work to help support the financial needs of the family. Often, they are children of parents who dropped out of school and, because of that, have a more difficult time providing the encouragement for their children to take the steps not only to high school graduation but to consider the option of moving on to college or trade school.
These are young people who need the programs that JA will bring to them - delivered by positive adult role model volunteers from the community - that will not only provide financial literacy and leadership education, but will also awaken their life dreams that may have been set aside due to their socioeconomic situations. JA is excited to have the opportunity to help reawaken their true potential, and positively impact the communities in which we all live and work.
Results:
Objective 1: With the return to classrooms post COVID, there was renewed interest in JA programming in the classrooms. JA worked to provide unique programs related to delivery, as well as, traditional programming. Some examples included the following:
JA trained over 80 volunteers from P&G to teach a 6-week course, either JA Economics for Success or JA It's My Business to all 8th grade classrooms in the Cincinnati Public Schools. They engaged around 2,700 students. The added value of this relationship is that the P&G volunteers can share their personal experiences and insights.
The University of Cincinnati's Early Childhood Education Center, part of the UC College of Education required their aspiring teachers in their junior year to teach in classrooms as part of their language arts requirement. After training from Junior Achievement, all juniors (in pairs) will teach 5 lessons of either JA Our Region (entrepreneurship) to 4th graders or JA Our Nation (work readiness) to fifth graders. It is expected that over 600 students will be served. The program generated so much excitement that we had requests for an additional 30 classrooms of 4th and 5th graders. Community volunteers were recruited to teach the classes.
Unite for Teen Literacy is a program designed in cooperation with United Way and 80 of their volunteers. JA designed the program lessons and trained the volunteers who then taught over 2,000 7th grade students in the Cincinnati Public Schools. Through this experience, students gained new knowledge about financial literacy.
Objective 2: The 2023 Cincinnati/NKY Inspire to Hire Career Expo was held on March 8th and 9th in the Northern Kentucky Convention Center. Around 3,650 students attended the 2-day event from 48 schools. The students explored potential careers representing ten career clusters during the events with 61 corporate vendors sharing stories and answering questions about their careers. The student outcomes included: the recognition of different career clusters, the gain of skills in researching the requirements needed to earn a position, implementation of job-hunting tools, interaction with business professionals, and an increase their understanding of career interests, skills, and work priorities.
In Warren County, three Warren County STEM Exploration Fairs brought 6th graders from three schools to Countryside YMCA for a day of STEM activities- learning about advanced manufacturing, robotics, innovation, problem-solving, and critical thinking. Students each built their own robot which they could take home to share with their family members.
Objective 3: Since the Virtual Career Exploration Fair (VCEF) is a teacher-led program, it is more flexible than the volunteer-driven classes.
Teachers are provided with educator guides and student workbooks. There are now three levels of the VCEF available for students in grades K-2, 3-5, and 6-8. Over 2,023 students have view and discussed videos from our Virtual Career Education Library of over 100 selections. Volunteers from the community continue to record career videos for the library and we seek to balance all of the career clusters.
Objective 4: The JA Stock Market Challenge is an event preceded by 3 classroom lessons from the program called JA Take Stock of Your Future. Through these classes they learn the basic concepts about how the stock market works and the impact of current events on the stock market. They will also develop their own financial plans and learn about investing. These classroom materials have been sent to teachers to complete prior to the Stock Market Challenge in May (moved from April). We will have the event again this year at Cincinnati State where students will complete in teams both live and virtually. The virtual version is for teams who cannot travel to Cincinnati State. That way, no one is excluded. This year, to cut costs, we did not hire an outside vendor to run the program. Junior Achievement USA developed their own version. One challenge this year will be to initially buy the 20 I-pads needed for the "traders."
Objective 5: Ohio law requires students who enter ninth grade for the first time on or after July 1, 2022, the class of 2026, to earn one-half credit of financial literacy as a graduation requirement. Several schools were early adopters of the JA Financial Literacy program, modified to fit all the OH State standards for the course. Reading and Lockland both taught JA Financial Literacy this year. We are eager for their feedback.
Website:
http://www.japartners.org Amount: $25,000
Date: January 2022
