Bill Schawbel Receives JA Worldwide Legacy of Leadership Award
December 2, 2022
Last week, JA Worldwide honored longtime JA supporter William “Bill” Schawbel with the JA Worldwide Legacy of Leadership Award. This award honors those who have dedicated much of their lives to making JA what it is today. Global Council member, Patricia L. Francy, received the inaugural award in 2021.
A JA alumnus, Bill participated in Junior Achievement at the Boston Latin School more than fifty years ago. “You might think my path to entrepreneurship began at JA,” Bill said in his speech at the awards dinner held on November 21 in Boston. “But it actually didn’t!” We can thank Bill’s mother for igniting his entrepreneurial mindset. An immigrant from Kyiv, Ukraine, Bill’s mother took her knack for knitting and crocheting and ran a yarn shop with her sisters out of their house in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. “A lot of the skills I used later to succeed were rooted in what I learned watching and working with my mother.” Bill honed those skills as a student in the Junior Achievement Club and in the JA Company Program in 1956, where he served as President of his student company.
After JA, Bill served as a Captain in the U.S. Army and graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He then went on to work as an intrapreneur for Gillette, establishing and acquiring new businesses for the corporation (a time he affectionally refers to as his “Senior Achievement” era). In 1981, Bill formed The Schawbel Corporation, which he sold in 2014 before forming Schawbel Technologies LLC. Today, he oversees Schawbel Companies, which encompasses the technologies business, and Schawbel Group, LLC, a boutique consulting organization.
At the Legacy of Leadership Award dinner, JA Worldwide CEO Asheesh Advani pointed out that Bill has dedicated nearly seven decades of his life to JA—as a student, a board member, a donor, and more.
“JA has been a constant in my life,” Bill said.
Bill has been a constant in JA’s life, too. In the last few years alone, he helped found the JA Worldwide Global Council in 2016, served as the Centennial Gala Chair in 2019, ran the virtual Boston Marathon on behalf of JA for his 80th birthday in 2020, and then did it again in 2021. In 2022, RSM and Junior Achievement of Greater Boston opened the JA Innovation Center in his honor.
“Bill is someone you can call to brainstorm ideas, devise solutions, ask advice from,” said Brandie Conforti, Chief Development Officer at JA Worldwide. “His wide-reaching support has made our organization stronger and more resilient and has given us the runway we need to broaden our aspirations to be truly boundless.”
“As a philanthropist, there can be no better value proposition that can be presented to me than investing in the lives of the young people who will one day be our makers, innovators, and leaders,” Bill said. “If we are going to prepare today’s youth for an uncertain future, then it will take all the resources we can garner to ensure the young people in our care today are ready for tomorrow. Resourcing the mission of JA isn’t supporting a charity; it is making an investment in our shared future.”
We couldn’t agree more, Bill.