TradeKing's Day with the Junior Achievement Kids

If anyone has seen my email signoff or letter closing, I substitute “Sincerely yours” with “Be Good”. Be Good is one of our main tenets here at TradeKing. If you are good to people, you can’t go wrong. This is what brings me to today’s topic. As part of TradeKing’s new volunteer program, where we focus our efforts on programs in our communities aimed at improving financial literacy, a few of our TradeKingers practiced being good to some motivated youngsters recently at a Junior Achievement “Biztown” event in Charlotte, NC.

Nicole Wachs, Stephanie Zubrinsky and Tiffany Lowry worked with future CEOs, Execs, Moguls, Entrepreneurs….well, you get it. Our future leaders of America! These ambitious (if they weren’t forced by mom and dad!) 3rd graders took 15 lessons before they could even participate in this event.  Some of the subjects these kids became mini-experts in were:

•    Supply and Demand

•    Taxes

•    Difference between public and private services

•    Role of charity in society

•    How to set prices for a product

•    Calculating expenses and profit

Once they complete the curriculum, they spend the last week working with their business team - creating ads, calculating expenses, planning products, etc. By the time they get to Biztown, they are very familiar with economics.

One wonders - do they even teach these finance fundamentals in college these days?

Tiffany summed it up perfectly, “Our experience was great. We were able to help the students do their duties as the CEO, CFO, and multiple other job titles specific to the business they worked.”

Some notable quotables from our team:

“This is the best day ever. This is better than Halloween,” a little before saying, “[I’m] on my break, I just need to relax. I needed to relax my mind. Working is hard and I’m tired.”

Another:

" This is hard work, now I know why my mom and dad are so tired when they get home."

Love it!

I am really proud of our new TradeKing volunteer program, and of our teammates who participated. Pitching in to assist young folks in understanding how the economy works is certainly time well spent, I say.

We are all busy people, but if you can take some time out and help out some motivated and grateful kids, I say the Junior Achievement organization is definitely worth checking out.  Junior Achievement is a non-profit organization. JA is funded by a variety of businesses such as: Allstate, AT&T, Citi, Deloitte, FedEx, GE, HSBC, Manpower and Oracle.

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