In the Fall of 2013, I was recruited to sit on the advisory board of JA of NWI, a division of Chicago. While a lot of our focus was to think of ways we could raise funds to support various programming, it was also to recruit volunteers and other advocates to teach in the classroom.
I was fortunate enough where I taught a multi-week series at Central Elementary in Valparaiso. One of the best parts of this organization is that I was able to go back to my home school system, River Forest Elementary School, to do ‘JA in a Day’. This programming essentially puts all of what kids will learn over the course of a few weeks in just a few hours. The teacher of the classroom was actually one of my peers in yearbook class from when I was in high school. While I enjoyed teaching financial literacy to the kids, we had a section on the zoning of a community which was exciting talking about schools and hospitals being placed next to graveyards.