FAQs and Key Narratives
About JA Worldwide
One to two paragraphs: As one of the world’s largest and most-impactful youth-serving nonprofits, JA Worldwide delivers hands on, immersive learning in entrepreneurship, work readiness, and financial health. Delivering more than 17 million student experiences each year in over 100 countries, JA Worldwide is one of few organizations with the scale, experience, and passion to build a brighter future for the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders.
One sentence: By building a wide range of skills and nurturing self-belief, JA prepares young people for the future of work, teaches them to think entrepreneurially, and ensures they have the tools to be financially capable adults.
Vision, mission, size, reach:
Vision: A world in which young people have the skillset and mindset to build thriving communities.
Mission: JA inspires and prepares young people to succeed in a global economy.
Size: More than 340 offices in 115+ countries.
Reach: Delivering more than 17 million student learning experiences each year through 300,000+ teachers and over 350,000 business volunteers.
Target audience: We equip young people from every corner of the world with the employment and entrepreneurship skills they need right now—and in the future. Our skill-building programs—for students as young as 5 and as old as 25—are more important than ever before in JA’s century of innovation and achievement.
JA Worldwide history and track record
Junior Achievement (JA) was founded in 1919 by Theodore Vail, president of American Telephone & Telegraph; Horace Moses, president of Strathmore Paper Co.; and Senator Murray Crane of Massachusetts. Our first offering, the JA Company Program, trained students to run their own small businesses through after-school clubs.
By 1955, JA had established a location in British Columbia, Canada, our first outside the United States. Twenty years later, we broadened our scope, moving from after-school programs into the classroom curriculum with the introduction of JA Project Business.
Since then, JA's hands-on, immersive educational programs—about half of which are taught in the classroom and the other half through after-school opportunities—have spread across the world, reaching more than 17 million young people each year.
Today, JA Worldwide is one of the world’s largest youth-serving NGOs, with more than 340 locations in 115+ countries that are served by six regional operating centers: JA Africa, JA Americas, JA Asia Pacific, JA Europe, INJAZ Al-Arab/JA MENA, and Junior Achievement USA.
What are JA’s core values?
Believe in the boundless potential of young people.
Advocate for the impact of relevant, hands-on learning.
Teach principled, market-based economics and entrepreneurship that build a more sustainable world.
Approach our work with passion, honesty, integrity, and excellence.
Seek out diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and talents in our staff, volunteers, and boards to reflect the geographics and communities we serve.
Nurture the power of partnership and collaboration.
What is JA’s competitive advantage?
JA’s global footprint enables significant breadth of impact:
JA’s global reach enables opportunities to partner at scale
JA succeeds in its capability to translate and integrate learning experiences throughout the world
The organization has built a strong brand worldwide and has a long-standing history of engagement
JA’s local footprint enables significant depth of impact:
Partnerships with local governments and ministries of education is perceived as a huge value differentiator to partners that want sustainable, systems-driven solutions
Community level engagement is very strong, with many localized events and volunteers that deliver culturally relevant programming and engagement
JA offers exceptional partnership qualities:
Within existing partnerships, JA has built strong teams, solid performances, and excellent work quality
JA team members are known to be collaborative, agile, talented, and mission-oriented
JA is also known to have a history of long-standing relationships with a diverse array of partners around the globe
What are your primary services? Where do you focus? What are your programmatic priorities? What do you do?
Cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset: Through JA’s real-world entrepreneurship programs—the longest-running in the world—students work as a team to develop an innovative product or service, finance their startup business, creatively market their product, deliver finished products, and launch their careers as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs.
Preparing youth for the future of jobs: JA’s volunteer-led work-readiness experiences teach critical work skills that prepare young people for college, trade school, or the workforce. Whether job shadowing skilled mentors, testing their skills through digital experiences, or developing solutions during business challenges, JA students are prepared for the jobs of the future.
Developing financial capability: JA’s hands-on, role-playing financial-health experiences expose young people to smart saving and investing, thoughtful spending and credit, the role of taxes, the value of employment and community involvement, and the opportunities of global trade. We prepare young people for lifelong financial health.
What is your educational approach, intervention logic, or theory of change?
Self-efficacy is at the center of JA’s educational approach/intervention logic/theory of change [choose the phrase that best matches the question], the underpinning of the JA difference, and serves as the foundation of many of our learning experiences. Self-efficacy is a major influencer of belief systems that can positively impact choices, motivation, and behaviors, leading to success when engaging in new challenges.
As they experience JA, our students develop self-efficacy—the belief that they have the power to achieve their goals—which is as important as skill building when preparing young people for employment and entrepreneurship. By acquiring critical work skills and activating their self-efficacy, JA students are more prepared for the future, have an edge in achieving their aspirations, reduce the likelihood of youth unemployment, and embark on startup enterprises in their communities.
JA students develop self-efficacy in four ways:
Skills acquisition: Mastering skills through hands-on experiences
Role models: Observing others with self-efficacy being successful
Practicing optimism: Rerouting negative thoughts into positive ones
Supportive belief: Hearing that others believe in your ability to succeed
The result is a global generation of empowered young people who are ready to compete for highly skilled jobs and embark on startup enterprises in their communities.
JA’s innovative staff has unparalleled access to schools, creating an ecosystem of hands-on programs driven by volunteers, teachers, policymakers, and the private sector. In addition to maintaining deep relationships with our funders, we’re forging partnerships with high-tech start-ups, universities, and like-minded organizations, giving even more students the opportunity to benefit from JA’s learning experiences.
What is Inspire-Prepare-Succeed? What is IPS?
Inspire-Prepare-Succeed (IPS) is the JA pathway of learning experiences.
Inspire: Introductory JA learning experiences that develop an interest.
Prepare: JA learning experiences that prepare youth for meaningful work and sustainable entrepreneurship by building skills, attitudes, and competencies.
Succeed: Applied JA learning experiences that demonstrate mastery of competencies.
For all three learning pathways, JA can form partnerships with organizations that support the development and/or amplification of those experiences
What is JA Worldwide’s impact, outcomes, outputs, or activities? What is the logframe/logic model approach?
Measurable impact statement: JA prepares youth for employment and entrepreneurship.
More general impact messaging: JA is a data-driven network that uses research and evidence not only to demonstrate our impact but also to make critical programmatic and policy decisions. We are constantly building our capacity to collect data, identify impacts, and develop systems for reporting and using data. As a global organization that operates in 115 countries with over 50 different programs, building this body of evidence has involved partnering with many different researchers in multiple countries to conduct numerous evaluations and studies.
At JA, we celebrate all forms of impact, from those that incubate global social movements to those that foster better outcomes for individuals, families, and communities. Since our founding, millions of JA alumni have built new ventures from the ground up, won election to the highest political offices, studied at leading universities, and invented products that have revolutionized industries. Millions more have built ethical and sustainable small businesses that help the world meet the challenges of the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development. And millions of other JA alumni have achieved less well-known—but no less laudable—successes, like being the first in their families to graduate from college, spending less than they earn in order to save for retirement, and becoming respected and effective leaders.
As a result of their JA experiences, our alumni start more companies, hire more employees, and produce significantly larger annual sales than ventures led by non-alumni. Our alumni also save more, hold less debt, and are less likely to spend more than they earn. JA alumni report higher levels of household income and career satisfaction. And they’re less likely to drop out of school, face unemployment, or collect social insurance. More at jaworldwide.org/impact.
How do you monitor and evaluate impact (methodology, tools, means of verification)?
JA's impact data is critical to determining whether our theory of change is effecting the outcomes we desire and whether funder investments are reaching their intended goals. Nearly every learning experience JA offers is measured for impact—whether through quantitative data-gathering, qualitative conversations, or both—and packaged into a report for the funder.
Then, every two years, JA Worldwide releases a global impact study (jaworldwide.org/impact) that merges storytelling, impact data, and design. Data in the latest report were sourced from over 40 studies (all hyperlinked to the original studies) of JA learning experiences from January 2007 to December 2022, using robust research methods and AI to measure program impacts. We grouped our data into sections on entrepreneurship, work readiness, financial health, academic performance, tech readiness, and thriving communities, with each section interweaving local, national, and regional impact studies with stories of the impact of JA on students' careers, families, and life trajectories.
Please include testimonials/quotes/stories.
[Pull from alumni stories section of website and/or featured alumni in deck.]
What is JA’s alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals?
[redefining; to come]
Describe how JA’s interventions contribute to the Humanitarian, Development, and Peace (HDP) nexus?
Operating in over 100 countries, JA teaches youth to develop the skillset and mindset to create businesses, find meaningful employment, and build healthy cities and towns. As a result of their JA experiences, our students become global citizens, develop civic-engagement skills, and nurture cross-border friendships from a young age. This drives many of our alumni to develop ambitions beyond their own economic reward, understanding that entrepreneurship is not only a means to financial wellbeing for themselves and their families but also a vehicle to foster social stability and inclusive societies, enabling them to fundamentally transform the world . . . or at least their small corner of it.
For over a century, JA has operated in countries and local areas of political instability, violence, and even war, helping youth build entrepreneurship skills and economic resilience in spite of the hopelessness around them.
JA is honored to have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize each of the last three years. Nobel Peace Prize nominations may be received from heads of state, certain elected officials and cabinet members, university professors in selected fields, past Nobel laureates, and other notable individuals, as laid out by the Nobel Nominating Committee.
[could also use underserved content to answer this question; see underserved content later in this document]
What is your DEI statement?
JA is for everyone, everywhere.
At JA Worldwide, not only are we committed to diversity of race, ethnicity, age, gender and gender identity, and sexual orientation in our staff, boards, and volunteers, we also highly value diversity of ideas, skillsets, industries, and geography to ensure our students are exposed to the greatest possible range of experiences and perspectives.
To best serve our students and offer them the experiences and role models they need to build self-efficacy, we seek to ensure that the JA network—including staff, teachers, business volunteers, and board members—is as diverse and inclusive as our students and alumni. With direct access to adults who share a similar background and set of experiences, JA students gain the confidence to amplify their voices, build sustainable movements, and work toward a better world.
Staff: JA is a network of teams, blending staff and boards of directors who are working on the ground in each JA location. This diverse group, coming from different backgrounds and sectors, reflects the multitude of geographies we serve. Our staff and board members are also uniquely positioned to understand the local culture and context, thus reducing barriers and opening doors to business leaders, governments, and other stakeholders. Our staff and board members not only ensure that more young people have access to a JA experience but also advocate for the impact of hands-on, immersive learning.
Volunteers and teachers: The volunteers and teachers who partner with us come from all walks of life and offer a unique perspective on life and work. Yet each recognizes JA’s transformative power on their students and the dynamic influence on their own classrooms. Teachers and volunteers also serve as role models and facilitators for JA learning experiences—a source of inspiration and encouragement for the young people in their classroom or project group. Teachers and volunteers are at the heart of our Theory of Change, which builds youth self-efficacy, a major influencer of belief systems that then positively impacts choices, motivation, and behaviors.
Youth: For over 100 years, we’ve been equipping youth in every corner of the world with the skillset and mindset to build thriving communities. Regardless of family income, social status, or local connections, JA students have the education and incentives to build businesses and learn to navigate the corporate world. Increasingly, JA students are defining a new approach to business and entrepreneurship, working not only to create jobs but also to eradicate poverty, ensure the sustainability of the planet, and enable mental health. It is our privilege to educate a generation that is using its voice to make the world more ethical, just, and peaceful.
Do you have a Human Rights Statement?
[This does not exist yet.]
Please attach your Code of Ethics, Code of Conduct, Safeguarding Policy, Data Protection, Conflict of Interest.
[See policies section of development landing page.]
What is JA’s political involvement?
JA is not a political organization. [Please say nothing else. This is the statement.]
Does your organization engage young people’s voices and ideas as part of the design, implementation, monitoring, and/or evaluation of your programs? If yes, describe how.
All JA learning experiences are tested with students before they’re launched and evaluated for impact based on feedback directly from students.
In addition, youth voices anchor our strategic planning, thought leadership, and participation at the world’s largest convenings. We co-author thought leadership with recent JA alumni—giving greater reach to their ideas and experiences—and ensure that students have a strong voice at UNGA, COP, Davos, and more.
To prepare for our last strategic planning process, we launched youthvoices.org—in partnership with Cortico, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, and Accenture—to surface youth experiences and perspectives through recorded small-group sessions. The project’s long-term goals include:
Measure the qualitative impact of JA and JA alumni communities
Include JA youth as key stakeholders in JA Worldwide’s decision-making processes
Create and build a youth-impact community and provide a platform to share youth voices
Establish a repository of JA alumni stories from around the world showcasing impact and successes
What is remarkable about the Youth Voices initiatives is that we have used it as yet another opportunity for young people to build skills. In order to enable peer-to-peer engagement and guild a safe space for young people to express themselves openly, participants were trained as conversation facilitators in their first year of the initiative; in the second and subsequent years, students have also been trained in the AI-driven sensemaking component. Both skill-building leadership roles lead to critical communication and technology competencies.
What are JA’s strategic priorities? What is “Boundless”?
JA’s boundless ambition is underpinned by a strategic framework that serves as our blueprint to accelerate inclusive growth and impact over the next five years. Our four strategic priorities are as follows: Accelerate Digital and AI, Empower the Underserved, Cultivate Partnership, and Strengthen OneJA.
Accelerate Digital: The COVID-19 pandemic both highlighted and exacerbated the need to reach youth where they are: through multiple digital channels. But accelerating digital learning also requires us to be mindful of the digital divide, enabling options that can circumvent a lack of broadband through lower-tech options, such as television, radio and podcasts, printed publications, and more.
Empower the Underserved: Increasingly, underserved communities in every region and country are home to a greater share of the global youth population. To successfully reach more youth and optimize impact, we’ll dedicate sufficient resources to supporting youth in these communities while continuing to drive impact where present.
Cultivate Partnerships: As we seek to make transformational impact around the globe, we’ll increasingly rely on an ecosystem of partners to support learning-experience development and delivery across the network. Partners may include governments, other NGOs and social-good organizations, ministries of education, corporations, and more.
Strengthen OneJA: To realize the impact we seek to create, we’ll amplify cross-pollination, collaboration, accountability, and impact across the network. Formalizing clearer governance structures for JA member locations and fostering greater clarity around these structures is also key to achieving strong, consistent impact, and a sustainable business model.
This strategic plan sets us on a path to reach 100 million students per year by 2050. How will we scale? By averaging 10% annual growth through our Inspire-Prepare-Succeed learning pathways, and through geographic expansion, partnerships, reaching the underserved, accelerating technology/digital, and more. (Visit jaworldwide.org/strategy for details.)
How does JA define “underserved”? How does JA reach and empower the underserved and under-represented?
One of JA’s strategic priorities is to “empower the underserved.” Increasingly, underserved communities in every region and country are home to a greater share of the global youth population. To successfully reach more youth and optimize impact, JA dedicates sufficient resources to supporting youth in these communities while continuing to drive impact where present.
JA defines the underserved as “youth who have low access and/or poor outcomes to education and livelihoods.”
Low access to education: Who is disproportionately not enrolled in primary, secondary, or post-secondary school? (Metric of interest: enrollment rate)
Poor education outcomes: Who is disproportionately not completing or succeeding in school? (Metrics of interest: graduation rate; assessment outcomes)
Low access to livelihoods: Who is disproportionately not in education, entrepreneurship/employment, or training (NEET)? (Metrics of interest: NEET (youth which are neither in employment nor in education or training); youth employment rate; youth entrepreneurship rate)
Poor livelihood outcomes: Who is disproportionately living or working at or below the poverty line? (Metrics of interest: average wage of employed youth; relative poverty line)
Describe your work with UN on refugees.
INJAZ Lebanon has partnered with UNICEF Lebanon and the Kingdom of the Netherlands to launch Generation of Innovation Leaders (GIL) in Bekaa and North of Lebanon. Designed to unlock access to the knowledge while also addressing high unemployment rates, GIL includes 30 hours of entrepreneurship training and another 25+ hours of coaching, incubation, and support. Since 2017, GIL has empowered 3,200 refugees, 700 seven of which reached the incubation phase and received seed funding for their startup.
UNICEF and JA Europe have teamed up to launch UPLIFT Youth, which aims to equip the most vulnerable youth and adolescents—most of which have arrived from Ukraine into neighboring countries—with life and business skills. Local youth are also part of the project to foster integration and social cohesion among young people, while also giving them a chance to transition from learning to earning. Eleven countries have participated in the project: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia, with the support of JA Greece, JA Italy, and JA Ukraine.
UNICEF and JA Greece have teamed up to implement “Empower Young People for better employment and entrepreneurship opportunities,” which aims to teach and reinforce skills and create opportunities for young people with a refugee and migrant background, many of whom live in shelters.
JA Italy has been pairing Ukrainian-speaking mentors with Ukrainian refugee youth (age 11 to 21) through the following two phases of JA UPSHIFT. UNICEF and JA Italy also partner through the Skills4Youth project, a four-hour entrepreneurship course (funded by AMIF) that develops teamwork, communication, managing emotions and social relationships, and empathy and helps youth understand their personal and professional aspirations, inclinations, and interests.
Explain the operational and legal structure of your organization. Describe how that structure affects your operations and plan for growth. Describe any relationships between your organization and partners or other organizations, if any, and the degree to which they are essential to your success.
JA is a network of teams, with 340 offices in 100+ countries, connected through the JA member agreement. JA’s extensive on-the-ground staff—in partnership with 375,000 business volunteers and 300,000 teachers—drives learning-experience delivery through unparalleled access to schools, employers, and government agencies, creating an ecosystem of students, volunteers, teachers, policymakers, and corporations. In addition to maintaining deep relationships with our stakeholders, JA partners locally and globally with high-tech start-ups, universities, and like-minded youth-serving organizations, giving even more students the opportunity to benefit from JA’s learning experiences.
The professional development of our 3,000+ global staff members is critical to our success, from our biennial virtual and in-person Global Leadership Conference that attracts thousands of staff members to our JA Worldwide Fellows Program that nurtures top talent, global communities of practice that share innovation and offer opportunities to mentor and be mentored; functional training and credentialling in areas ranging from project management to AI and tech skills, pro-bono coaching through Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches Initiatives, and more.
What marketing/visibility ROI can we provide partners?
The power of OneJA includes the following benefits:
3,500+ staff members connected by a biennial virtual and in-person Global Leadership Conference (GLC), quarterly Global Town Halls, monthly OneJA newsletters with industry-leading open rates, and daily interaction through our internal website and communities of practice.
An online alumni community with over 50,000 members, accompanied by virtual and in-person conferences, monthly newsletters, leadership academies, and more.
6,000+ board members serving on local, national, regional, and global boards, representing the top corporations in the world.
Global network social-media reach of over five million fans and followers.
A globally recognized, 100-year-old brand with unparalleled reach and impact.
Sophisticated research, advocacy, and thought-leadership outputs with global reach.
Collaborations with the United Nations, World Economic Forum, G20, Global Entrepreneurship Week, World’s Best School Prizes, Global Teacher Prize, and more.
The only NGO on Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, 2022.
Winner of the EdTech Cool Tools Award for Mobile App Solution, 2024.
Ranked the last six years among the Top Ten Global Social-Good Organizations by NGO Advisor (recently rebranded as thedotgood): 7th in 2019, 2020, and 2021; 6th in 2022; 5th in 2023 and 2024.
Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the last three years (2022, 2023, 2024).
Marketing deliverables usually include the following external communications:
Naming and co-branding of the partnership initiative, as needed
Partner logo and recognition on the JA Worldwide website, with messaging and branding aligned with partner comms team
Announcement of partnership via JA Worldwide’s website, global newsletter, and social media channels
Inviting partner leadership to serve on JA juries, panels, webinars; dedicated JA Worldwide Marketing/Communications staff ensures they have a run of show, talking points, any slides they need, etc.
And the following internal communications:
Announcement of partnership to internal staff
Presentation deck for JA members to introduce the project and recruit volunteers
Toolkit of any partnership marketing/communications collateral, including web and social copy, web and social graphics, sample media announcements, along with guidance on how to deploy
With additional deliverables possible:
Global press release
Dedicated, interactive webpage about the partnership, including testimonials, results of initiative/event/project, infographic or short video about the partnership, and interview with partner leadership
Small social paid promotion on select channels to extend organic reach
Ongoing marketing campaign of varying length and complexity, as designed by the marketing-to-marketing relationship
Paid search-engine marketing and/or additional social-media paid promotion to either further promote the partnership or recruit students/teachers/volunteers for a particular initiative
Thought leadership, co-authored by one person from each organization; researched, ghostwritten, and submitted for review and final approval by JA Worldwide; shopped around to appropriate publications; and published on JA Worldwide’s thought leadership magazine, Good Company, either in lieu of or in addition to publication elsewhere
Launch, closure, research, or thought leadership panel or event