70 Years of Impact: Stories That Shape Junior Achievement:
From JA Student to JA Volunteer


As a junior in high school in 1977, I had no particular interest in business, but I did want to take advantage of extracurricular opportunities to learn, especially about how the adult world worked. One of those opportunities was Junior Achievement, which gave high school students the chance to form and run a miniature business. Our advisors, from Stanley Works (in New Britain, CT), helped us organize the company, which we called Vendex. They had done a lot of the work up front, providing an idea for a product, design and machinery for making the product, ideas for company names, and of course education on how running a company worked.

We each bought shares of stock in our new company, for $1 each, and sold additional shares to our parents and their friends. We elected officers for the company, who then had what I considered the unenviable responsibility of getting a bunch of teenagers to work together and get things done. I had no interest in management, being much more comfortable as just another production worker. But I learned in the process much more than I had ever understood from just textbooks what it meant to invest in a company, and how revenues and expenses resulted in a profit (or loss).

I also learned that I did not ever want to go into sales, although I was able to sell a number of the denim tote bags we manufactured. (My mother used hers for years, until it finally wore out.) I also learned a lot about the difficulties of keeping a production line running efficiently, when absence due to sickness (or otherwise simply not showing up) or inactivity due to chatting with friends, instead of getting work done, resulted in work piling up at one workstation because it wasn’t being processed at the next one. We could alleviate the problem somewhat by learning each other’s jobs, and eventually I think I knew all the steps from cutting fabric to finishing the bag.

I don’t remember how much I made as a production worker at a sewing machine, how much money Vendex made in the end, or what kind of return we were able to give to our shareholders. But I have never forgotten the hands-on introduction to business that Junior Achievement gave me, far more meaningful than anything I could have learned in a classroom.

About thirty years later, I had the opportunity to become a Junior Achievement classroom volunteer. It might not be like my own experience in Junior Achievement, but I wanted to do what I could to contribute to young people’s financial literacy. I have been a classroom volunteer on and off over the past fifteen years or so, working with students from first through sixth grade, and have presented several different JA programs. Since I only see the students five or six times, I don’t get much sense of how much they really carry with them from my presentations, but they’re learning something at least about money, the things we buy with it, and about different kinds of job and companies. And it’s given me the chance to share about my own experiences, from making my own greeting cards and selling them door to door as a young girl, to studying abroad as a college student and gaining a new perspective on cultural differences and their significance for global trade.


Pauline Evans
JA Alumna and Volunteer