Celebrating Our 100th Anniversary
Junior Achievement (JA) will be celebrating its centennial throughout 2019. JA was started in 1919 in Springfield, Massachusetts by Strathmore Paper Founder Horace Moses, AT&T Chairman Theodore Vail and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts Murray Crane. JA’s founding was in response to families moving from farms to the growing industrial cities. The goal was to provide young people with the skills they would need to be successful adults in their new communities.
During the course of the past 100 years, JA has evolved from an organization operating primarily in the Northeastern United States and teaching teens how to start a business into a multinational organization reaching more than 10 million students in 100 countries with programs that promote entrepreneurship, career and work readiness and financial literacy. In the United States, JA reaches nearly 5 million students in grades K-12.