Finance Park Provides Students Experience of Making Real Life Financial Management Decisions
Junior Achievement of New York (JA New York) is the local affiliate of Junior Achievement USA® (JA), the world's largest organization dedicated to giving young people the knowledge and skills they need to own their economic success, plan for their future, and make smart academic and economic choices. Our volunteer-delivered, K-12th grade programs foster college and career-readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy skills, and use experiential learning to inspire students to dream big and reach their potential. With the help of more than 5,000 business and community volunteers, more than 67,000 NYC and Long Island students develop the skills they need to experience the realities and opportunities of work and entrepreneurship in the 21st-century global marketplace.
Capital One/Junior Achievement Finance Park™For example, Capital One/Junior Achievement Finance Park™ is an innovative mobile financial education program that teaches the core principles of money management to middle and high school students. Following four weeks of in-class lessons, students enter a mock city where they become “adults for a day,” developing and managing a budget and making real-life financial decisions.
Together, Capital One and Junior Achievement have served more than 200,000 students nationally through Finance Park. More than 11,000 COF associates have volunteered to teach kids financial literacy through Finance Park. Locally, Capital One/Junior Achievement Finance Park rolled out on Long Island in 2008 where it has run for seven consecutive years. In the fall of 2009, it expanded to the borough of Brooklyn, and in fall 2010, the program expanded to Manhattan. To date, more than 20,000 NYC and Long Island middle and high school students have participated in the program. This spring, we are anticipating more than 3,500 more students to take a walk through Finance Park.
- In 2010, Capital One and Junior Achievement opened the doors to a state-of-the-art permanent Finance Park center on the campus of Frost Middle School, in Fairfax County, Virginia. Capital One invested into the creation of this new, experiential financial literacy center, which serves 14,000 students a year from across the Greater Washington DC region.
- In 2012, Capital One and JA announced they will open a second financial literacy center in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
- Capital One also teamed up with JA to launch an online version of the program called JA Finance Park Virtual, which is expected to reach tens of thousands of students across the country. JA Finance Park Virtual is available at http://financepark.ja.org/.
