Junior Achievement of North Florida Reaches Nearly 35,000 Students in One Year

Junior Achievement of North Florida (JA) has announced another year of remarkable impact, empowering 34,969 students across 67 schools with essential skills in financial literacy, career readiness, and entrepreneurship during the 2024-2025 school year. With the support of 1,299 dedicated volunteers and 345 educators, JA delivered more than 104,944 student contact hours, equipping the next generation with the tools and confidence to build brighter futures.

For more than 60 years, JA of North Florida has worked to close opportunity gaps and help young people, especially those in under-served communities, connect classroom learning with future success. Through hands-on programming and immersive learning experiences, students are gaining the skills they need to navigate life beyond the classroom.

“As we reflect on the 2024-2025 school year, we are proud of how Junior Achievement of North Florida has continued to elevate its impact—broadening access, deepening relevance, and helping more students across our region believe in what’s possible,” said Shannon Italia, President of JA of North Florida. “With the support of our partners, we are preparing students not just for the future, but for their future.”

This year’s programming placed a strong emphasis on experiential learning, helping almost 35,000 students engage with JA programming in ways that directly mirror real-life scenarios, whether learning how to trade stocks or exploring career pathways with local professionals.

Current experiential learning programs include:

JA in a Day: Volunteers from local businesses teach JA curriculum in one impactful day, helping elementary students connect classroom lessons to real-world concepts.
JA Career Speaker Series: Professionals share their career journeys with middle and high school students, offering insight into job roles, industries, and education paths.
JA Career Exploration Fair: High school students rotate from station to station to explore career options, internships, and training opportunities across various fields while industry leaders share information about their business.
JA Heroes: High school students become role models by teaching JA lessons in elementary classrooms, building leadership and communication skills, confidence, and a passion for service.
JA Job Shadow: High schoolers take a guided tour of workplaces to explore careers firsthand and understand how education connects to future job opportunities.
JA Take Stock in Your Future: Students learn about investing and apply their knowledge in a competitive stock market simulation, the JA Stock Market Challenge, to see who can grow the largest net worth.

The momentum isn’t slowing; JA is actively working on long-term plans to expand and build a state-of-the-art experiential learning facility, with a vision to reach more students, more deeply, across Northeast Florida.