Non Profit Program Quality

Program Completion Quality

Introduction

“At no time in recent history has the need for financial literacy and economic education been more evident. With the media constantly relaying stories of home foreclosures and savings lost, we are quickly reminded of the risks of poor personal financial management. These issues touch people of all walks of life, but leave the financially uneducated the most vulnerable.” (JA Chicago, n.d.).

Junior Achievement is a non-profit organization that provides educational materials for classrooms in grades kindergarten through twelve. Topics of these programs include entrepreneurship, financial literacy and work readiness skills. The programs are hands-on and activity based. The ideology behind Junior Achievement is to not have the classroom teachers facilitate the program, but instead community volunteers. The volunteer can teach the program in one of two ways: first, they can visit the classroom five times for about 45 minutes and teach one lesson at a time or with the classroom teacher’s approval, the volunteer could spend about 4 hours with the class and teach the whole program in one morning.

The Junior Achievement of Chicago office was chartered in 1940 and is the largest franchise of Junior Achievement in the United States. There are approximately 50 employees in the JA of Chicago Office, 40 of which are Operations Managers. The role of the Operations Manager is to manage a certain area of Chicago. That person is responsible for everything that happens in their area including funding, volunteers and interested classrooms. A large portion of this role is finding and training volunteers. Junior Achievement of Chicago planned to reach 410,000 students in the 2010-2011 school year. If the average classroom size is around 25 students, there needed to be around 16,400 volunteers in the Chicago-land area to teach these programs.

Problem

Junior Achievement set’s their goals based on the school year. During the summer, the...