JA Celebrates Our 105th Anniversary
December 1, 2024
From teaching financial health and entrepreneurship to fostering work-readiness skills, JA has made a profound impact on millions of students worldwide. Last year alone, JA delivered more than 17 million student experiences around the world, and today, we celebrate JA's 105th anniversary.
A Brief History of JA
by Jack Kosakowski, Junior Achievement USA CEO, 2007–2024, written for JA’s centennial
On December 1, 1919, Oscar H. Benson, a government official and former educator, submitted his resignation to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Mr. Benson, who had spent most of the previous decade establishing the 4H organization in his role as a Director of the Agricultural Extension office, had decided to accept a position as the first national director of what would soon be called “Junior Achievement.”
Junior Achievement, or JA, was the vision of business leaders Horace Moses, founder of Strathmore Paper Company, and Theodore Vail, President of AT&T, who, along with U.S. Senator Murray Crane, established JA in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the United States. JA was a response to the mass migration of farm families from rural America into booming U.S. cities in the wake of industrialization. The program was aimed at giving young people the skills they would eventually need to be successful adults in the country’s growing urban centers.
For JA’s first 50 years, the JA Company Program was the organization’s primary offering, giving young people the chance to set up their own businesses with the guidance of advisors from the business community in after-school settings. Using this model, JA grew from a regional program in the northeastern United States during the 1920s and 1930s into a national organization following World War II.
By the mid-1950s, the first JA operation outside of the United States was established in Canada, and by the 1960s an affiliated organization, Young Enterprise, was running in the United Kingdom. In the following decades, JA programs would be offered throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, JA programs grew rapidly in Central Europe and former Soviet states.
Since our founding 100 years ago, JA programs have impacted more than 100 million young people. They are now offered in more than 100 countries. And while the programs and delivery have changed quite a bit during that time, one thing has remained constant: the focus on changing young people’s lives with knowledge and critical life skills through the support of caring volunteer mentors.
O.H. Benson was with JA for our first ten years, and then went on to support other important youth-development organizations. He led JA with the goal of addressing the challenges of the last century. His spirit is alive and well with JA today in a new century as we pursue our mission to inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy.