Celebrating 50 Years of Junior Achievement of Lincoln | Ken's Story

Author: JA Lincoln
Community Involvement
Published: Thursday, 25 Feb 2021

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Image caption: Ken Carlson

Ken Carlson
Junior Achievement of Lincoln President from 1977-2009

“Junior Achievement began with high school students participating in quasi-legal for-profit companies four evenings a week for 18 weeks. Led by business volunteers, they experienced a complete corporate cycle from capitalization to liquidation in a building on the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company campus. It was hands-on learning. It was relationship building with teammates. The business volunteers were role models. It was exciting for me to be a part of those action-filled evenings with eager young people and committed volunteers.

It was a near-total immersion in our free enterprise system. So much so that it is still not unusual for some of those young people to recall today the products they produced, the sponsoring company, volunteer names and whether or not they made a profit.

We called it “an old friend in a new suit of clothes“ as JA moved from an off-site high school program to the classrooms of our public and parochial schools in the mid-1980’s. National JA created age-appropriate hands-on activity modules for kindergarten through twelfth grade classrooms that enhanced classroom learning.

The excitement for me now was two-fold: witnessing how effective national JA was in creating these learning modules and, two, observing the teacher/business volunteer teams leading those activities. In the past 50 years, Junior Achievement of Lincoln has grown from a single program in a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company building to multiple programs in 117 schools in Lincoln and 12 counties across Nebraska. Now I’m amazingly excited!

It has been my great privilege to be a part of this unique business-education adventure for three-fifths of the organization’s history. It has been my great privilege to see our young people at work on their life’s journeys. They inspired me then and they continue to do so today.

It has been my great privilege to witness the commitment of our business and community volunteers, financial supporters, teachers and school administrators driving these essential economic education lessons.

It has been my great privilege to witness the foresight and decision-making abilities of the Junior Achievement of Lincoln staff and the organization’s boards of directors/trustees. You folks got it right 50 years ago and you’re on the right track for the next five decades.

Much of what is good in life happens because just one person said, “let’s do this.” That person was Dan Remigio, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant manager in 1971. He introduced the program to Lincoln, formed the first board of directors, provided the Goodyear facility for the evening companies and promoted the effort to financially support it during those formative years.

I wish that Dan were alive today as we celebrate this truly great accomplishment. He would be so proud.”