 and welcome. I'm Peter Rostock. I'm your host for Hawaii's Volunteer Champions, a program here on ThinkTechHawaii.com where we talk to a wide variety of volunteers and ask them what they do and find out a little bit about the organizations they do it for. But mostly we want to find out why in the world people give up two of the most valuable assets and resources, their time and their effort to help some cause or other. And what they get out of it, what they think they're doing for others in doing this work. So today we're going to talk about junior achievement, which is if you're old and as I am, you remember from when you were a kid. And maybe we'll find out a little more about the history of that. But our guest today is Imari Han, who is a banker and a branch manager for First Foundation Bank and is a volunteer for junior achievement. Imari, welcome. Good to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Pleasure. And we also have David Earls, who's the junior achievement executive director. And he's going to tell us more about the organization. But Imari, let me start right in. What do you do for junior achievement? So I get to go into the classroom and teach the materials. And each classroom is different, each grade is different. And I have fun every time, no matter what grade I have taught. Every time, I want to just go every time. Okay, go ahead. What do you do when you get to the classroom? What do you do? So junior achievement is super organized. So they always give me a packet, well-prepared material with everything I need. So all I do is show up with a packet and teach the lesson. So it's easy for me. All I have to do is make sure that I interact with every children in the class and helping them do the activities and get the concept and have fun. That's the most important thing. And what are the concepts? What are you trying to... You're not teaching people to grow roses or something like that. What are you teaching them as a banker? Yes, so well, the materials, last time I taught, it was entrepreneurship. So it was a little bit older class and entrepreneurship. So teaching about what is a business? What is a commerce? What do you do when you sell things? What do you have to think about? And I can see the wheels turning and they have found creating their own businesses, that type of concept. And they have to understand you're doing this to make money. What is money? How do you make money? That kind of stuff. So finance information is important too. So I educate them on that part. How much time a week a month? How often do you do this kind of thing? Well, every school year or semester, sometimes multiple times a year, they ask me to come in. And sometimes it's a three-day session. Sometimes it's five days. So I get to choose how I like to participate. Wow. And your employer is okay with you disappearing for that amount of time to do this work? Yes, then it's not a long period of time that I'm gone. And this is very valuable. And I'm very blessed to have a workplace that allows me to go and volunteer. You know, I'm not teaching the adult that's coming into the branch and opening account. It's not that type of, you know, volunteerism, right? But we're planting the seeds and they support me, you know, given back to the community this way. That's terrific. Just tell us because I had not heard of First Foundation Bank and I imagine neither one of my regular listeners has heard of it. Tell us a little bit about First Foundation Bank. Yes, it's a regional bank. But with a $12.8 billion in assets, it is considered a big bank. In Hawaii, there's only one branch and that's probably the reason why you haven't heard of us. We're located in Kakaako, Waterfront Plaza. And it was formerly Pacific Rim Bank for this location. But we do have branches in California, Texas, Florida, and Nevada. All right, that's terrific. So tell me a little bit more about going into the classroom. What are the, what's the youngest students you've ever dealt with? What are the oldest students you've ever dealt with? Tinder was the youngest and that's little, you know, difficult to really teach a class. So it's more like playing so that they would understand, you know, the lesson. But the older children, you know, it's more like creating a business. So there is actually an activity you have to think about what business, what are you selling price point, profit margin, you know, that type of deal. So. And do you find, are you kind of starting from scratch on these subjects? Because I remember, I think when I was in school, we didn't get very much like this. And I always thought, you know, they should have taught me how to write and check. They should have taught me how to balance a checkbook or things like that. I never learned that in school. I had to go back to the University of Hawaii and get an executive MBA before I could figure out how, well, I could figure out how to balance the checkbook. But there's not very much education like this in the public schools. Is there? No, this is the reason why I think junior achievement is fantastic. You know, I don't have to come up with a material. They give me the material to teach. You know, when it comes to whatever public it is that's in the curriculum, it's easy for the teachers, the volunteers, to teach because it's all spelled out what to say, how to engage. And I'm good with engaging with people, especially kids. I can get a little of myself. David, let's go to you for a minute. Tell us a little bit about junior achievement nationally or internationally, actually, and in Hawaii. Sure, Peter. First of all, thank you. Thanks for doing this. You know, volunteerism here in Hawaii is such an important thing. And there's so much of it here that just needs some focus, right? Find a purpose for what you do. And when we get someone like you, Mari, that's excited about it, excuse me, from the standpoint of it's her day job to deal with the adults that haven't learned this stuff. And she can now raise the kids up in this way. It's really kind of fun. It's very exciting. So junior achievement as a national organization has been around a hundred and I want to say nine years. I probably should have looked that up a hundred over a hundred years. Let's leave it at that. 1919. There you go. According to Wikipedia, it would must be true. So 1919, I think. Thank you. You did the homework. I should have done there. I appreciate it. So, yes, so a hundred and what's at four years now. But the J.A. Hawaii chapter actually started in 1957. So it's very interesting history. I won't get into the depths of it. Literally, the Honolulu police chief was really tired of the ruffian kids running around his gangs. And he got the civic leaders in Honolulu together and said, how do we help? What do we do about this? How do we get these kids to realize they don't have a future being a gang member? How do we get them to realize the future is actually in business? And they sent they picked their first executive director, sent them off to San Francisco, and he brought back the first of the lesson kits, went through some training, and it's evolved through the years. And yet the basic premise is the same. We're a very small staff wise, but we have a lot of volunteers, a lot of people like Imari. We love to go into the classrooms. We have 53 different lessons that we can access. You know, when Imari says, yeah, it's all just you go in and open up a kit and read the stuff, it's true from kindergarten, clear through 12th grade, 53 different types of lessons that can be taught. And so what we do is we interact with teachers and parents can get involved too in this, but it's mostly the teachers that asked for lessons. And so they call us up. They say, I've got a class I want to be able to teach, whether it's an entrepreneurship class at the older grade levels or it's just flat out the basics of economics at a lower class level. Then we paired that classroom up with a volunteer like Imari. And we've got a spreadsheet right now, I checked today. There are over 80 teachers right now that are asking for classes that we don't have a volunteer set up for this year already. Now that doesn't mean we won't get them because we have a lot more teachers are going to ask. And we have a lot of volunteers that only can do it next semester or whatever else. And so it really comes down to scheduling. But the beauty to this is Imari can go on the spreadsheet, look at when she has time, and pick a lesson plan that she's comfortable with, and can drive to a classroom where she wants to teach these classes. And that's what we do with all the volunteers. It's pretty exciting stuff. When you can teach Peter a young person how to balance a checkbook, and they realize my mom and dad haven't done this, and they go teach mom and dad. I kid you not, it happens. It's powerful. It's very powerful. Besides banking or finance or whatever, the things that Imari is teaching, what are some of those other lesson plans? So we really focus on finance, on entrepreneurship. So basics of finance, literally from the beginning, entrepreneurship is kind of fun at the younger grade levels. For instance, one of the lessons I found intriguing, and I wish I could go teach, but I don't get credit if we teach a staff. We have the volunteers do it. But I've gone in and watched a few. And one week, the volunteer told every kid in the classroom, they were like, first or second grade. They said, when you drive home tonight with mom and dad, I want you to look at all the signs on the road and realize that every sign on every building is pretty much somebody owns that. Clear up through the safeway, whatever it is, somebody owns that. And I want you to come back next week and tell me which one of those buildings you want to own when you grow up. And get them thinking along those lines. The third leg of the stool, so it's finance, entrepreneurship. The third one, we do have workforce readiness programs too. Trying to teach kids more about the importance of being on time, importance of dressing properly, you know, for an interview, those sorts of things as well, so that we're trying to repair the youth of today to be the leaders of tomorrow. That's really what we're all about. Leaders and workers. And let's not underestimate the importance of having people who can, you know, we feel we're feeling it now, just having the people to staff the various jobs we need everywhere you go. Short staff is hurting a lot of businesses today. For the record, is this just for public schools or private schools or what is there any differentiation about which kind of schools can call you up and ask for some help? So we focus heavily on the low and middle income public school systems, but we definitely have kids or teachers calling us clear up through the Poonahos and Iolani's and saying, hey, I want to see your kids. I want to understand what you're doing. And they will use our lesson plans. And all of this is free by the way to every teacher that asks. All of it's free to every kid. We don't charge a dime for this stuff. We go fundraise otherwise. Make sure that everybody that needs this actually gets it. Never finances the reason behind not having access. Wow, that's great. So in other words, any teacher could ask for a kit about entrepreneurship and use that kit in their classroom. Anybody under the 12th grade I guess. So what kills me is I literally last weekend sat with a friend who was a finance person that's now gotten into real estate and all this and she was asking me what she what I do for a living. I was telling her and she says, wow, last year I volunteered at a private high school and I taught finance and I had to make up the curriculum myself. And I just kind of laughed. I said, yeah, I could have given you exactly what you're looking for completely turnkey. And that's what we do. We've got a storage shed here full of these kits and there's actually digital lessons as well. If the teacher and the youth are willing to go with the digital version, we much prefer that because we prefer not having to print all these extra piece of paper, having all these extra, you know, things in and out in the environment that may not or may not all get used. And so we have digital access to every one of our lesson plans as well. And we open it up for the teachers and the volunteers that way too. Wow, that's pretty amazing. Obviously, I didn't know that. And I'm pretty sure a lot of people don't know that that's the way So, Amari, do you do all your volunteer work in person or you do anything in Zoom in these days and times? I have done it through Zoom during COVID. You know, that was out of this. But I didn't want to stop volunteering. It was challenging though. It was even more challenging to keep them their attention. So I might rather do this in person. I walk around, I touch base with every kid. So, you know, I can't do that online. So I do it in person. So no question. You'd rather be doing it in person, even though it means obviously it's a longer haul to get out to the schools and you take more time. You could do it from your desk in half the time, but you'd rather be out there interacting with the students. Absolutely. I do. I do much rather be in person with every meeting or class, you know, not just volunteering. When I see my clients, same thing. I rather much much rather do it in person. That's very interesting. And what do you get out of this? I mean, do you seem to enjoy it? But, you know, what does it do something for you personally? You know, I just love talking to kids and see the light bulb go, you know, I love it. And, you know, from the beginning of the class, the session to the end of the session, you know, I love seeing the progress. You know, sometimes I hear them saying, oh, I want to work at the bank like you, or I want to be a, you know, baker or whatever the lesson we might be talking about. They understand what they can achieve and they're so excited. And I love seeing that. And especially when I get to teach class like, you know, finance or how to get a job and keep a job. I feel like I'm developing my own future associate. You know, there's the satisfaction someday these people are going to be my, you know, associate possibly, right? I love it. Be careful. You don't want them to be your associates. You don't want them to take your job. So you got to be a little careful. I'm always, when I used to teach journalism, I was always very wary of somebody, you know, there are a lot of kids smarter than I am. So I'm going to ask you a tough question now and David's here, but he's not listening. So is there anything you would change about the program? Anything you would say, gee, I wish this was being done differently. Or, you know, this was really a drag. Is there anything like that that you'd like to see handled differently? Not really. I just love doing junior achievement work. You know, the part that I don't like the most will be reading all the materials prior to the class. You know, I feel like I'm sitting in a class. I have to do all these reading, but then that's necessary, right? So only thing if they could change any part of the prep work to be available online, maybe, you know, instead of the paper book, maybe there's a prep work digital version there, maybe some of them on the video, something like that. It'll make it easier. All right, David, I know you weren't listening to that, but so there's there's a thought making, you know, making it a little easier for your volunteers is how do you do that? I mean, how do you get volunteers? They're committing not just the time in the classroom or in the with the students, but they're committing, I think, a lot of time to just getting ready and making sure they know what what they're supposed to teach. Correct. So these kits are actually created by a PhD level team of trainers on the mainland out of Colorado is actually where J.A. USA is based. There's actually also a J.A. worldwide, which broke away from the United States side about 20 years ago. And J.A. worldwide is huge in Africa right now, huge in parts of Asia and really large also growing in South America in ways that you wouldn't expect because the rest of the world is waking up too to the fact that entrepreneurship, having business skills, even basic finance is how you thrive in this in this world. You know, of course, people skills, all the other things are there and important too. But so this PhD level team of educators create the actual lesson plans, and then they test them over and over and over. And in fact, we those kits change every two to three years, something in them changes as they learn and as they grow. And then also the feedback that we give such as what Amari just did about, hey, I would like to cut down on my prep time. I heard that I was just at the National Conference just a few weeks ago, and that was also brought up there. Volunteering in this time coming out of COVID has really changed. You know, during COVID, we had everybody volunteering because we were able to go zoom classes for everything. We had CEOs and presidents of organizations left and right saying, I can finally handle an hour, and they go do a one hour presentation, but they do it from their office without ever leaving and they could just schedule that hour. Now, it's as the we're back in the classroom, the teachers saying, you know what, we're tired of zoom, please bring the volunteer to us. And so there is a lot of time to drive to these classrooms, especially if, you know, most of our volunteers maybe work in the downtown corridor, and we're trying to get out to have a beach or wherever else it may be. You know, we're on all at this is a statewide organization. So we're other places too. In fact, Hilo is really active. Hilo has been exceedingly active almost since inception in the late 1950s. They've got their own advisory council and they really are active because it's a tight knit community. So their volunteer base stays right there and does their thing together. It is a struggle to get the volunteers to give, you know, three, four hours of their time to do one lesson in the same way. How many volunteers stay on Oahu here? What's the bank of volunteers roughly that you can draw upon? So during COVID, we hit about 350 volunteers statewide. And I would say two thirds of them were on Oahu alone. I actually didn't pull out that that stat. But this last year we dropped clear down to 171 volunteers this last school year. And so we're aiming to go to 200 again this year. Our numbers are up. We're actually getting more students, more classrooms as we go back into it because it was just more volunteers were willing to do one zoom class. But once we get into a school room and teachers see the value and the students, we have other students wanting to do it as well. You know, this translates to over, actually, I'm going to tell you our target. I'm looking sideways at my screen to look at these numbers. My staff have heard this, but it's not published. My board hasn't even heard. We're aiming to do 350,000 instruction hours this current school year here in Hawaii. Oh, that's impressive. So Amari, we hear from David, they're going to be looking for more volunteers. What would you say to somebody? You know, you must talk about this dinner with friends or family or whatever. You do this. What are you crazy to give up all this time? What would you say to somebody to convince them to actually go and volunteer? That it's fun, you know, it's fun interacting with kids. And it feels so good that you're actually teaching them something that they feel it's valuable, you know, and you don't have to do any prep aside from reading. You can just go in and teach your stuff. So it's easy. It's satisfying. It's great fun. You know, why not volunteer? It doesn't take a whole lot of time. Well, that's great. That's great. So the elevator has gotten to the bottom floor and you've given me the elevator speech about why I should be a volunteer. David, how does somebody become a volunteer? What do they have to do? Are there any, you know, any hoops to jump through? You have to be able to breathe. You have to be able to talk and you have to be able to think a little bit. I was almost there. Of course, we can't all be a Mari, right? But at the same time, when I mentioned that it's a mainland firm, a mainland team of people that put these lessons together, that automatically says, Oh, does it fit with Hawaii? Is it something the kids will understand? And that's why the importance of these volunteers, we want people to walk in the door, use the concepts that the educators say these kids need, but give it the local flair of their own personal experience here in Hawaii. You know, it's far more than just having a kid hear the words that's on a piece of paper. It's actually getting to the point of almost a mentorship where it's not the teacher reading the stuff. It's somebody in the work world that they can look up to and say, you know, some young lady or man could look up and say, I want to be a Mari someday and start listening in a way that you otherwise wouldn't. And that's what we get a lot of with these youth who really want to become more than they are. Based upon the I've seen my teacher a thousand times and I'm tired of her and the principal keeps putting me in his office or whatever it is. Here's somebody that walked in the door that says, Oh, I actually could own a 7-Eleven or, you know, whatever it is, I could come up with my own idea or I could be a really good worker in the world I'm in. And that's the real power behind what we do is personalizing it for Hawaii's youth again so that they become our future leaders. That's interesting. Do you have examples where volunteers have gone into a classroom and then they've come out, but they've kept the, you know, the students follow them, so to speak, where they've continued a relationship or mentorship and went just beyond the, you know, the hour or two hours they were in the class? So we actually have national, this was interesting, the national office chased down a young lady who was at Radford High School a number of years ago, so before my time involved. And I was sitting at the national conference a year and a half ago and they kicked up this video interviewing this girl and was going, she could be from Hawaii. And as I listened, I go, she just used the word pal and I kept listening. I go, what's going on here? And she's now working in finance in San Francisco and she attributes it directly to a gentleman. I'm not going to use names. I don't actually remember all the names of everyone involved who came to her high school and taught an entire series of classes called company program and she got involved in them and was deeply involved, created her own little business and sold a product out of company program is what they do with that lesson plan. And that got her thinking about how do I get into this world? And it's very powerful stuff that these kids every day learn from us. You know, when I was young, people in junior achievement, as I recall it, they would create a business and they would create a product that something, you know, that they could actually try to figure out to you know, in those days it was building out of kind of raw materials, not computers, but you build something, you create something and you try to sell it. Is that still the way junior achievement works? So that is one of the lessons that is called company program. That's one of the things we do. It's actually about to start up and heal this. I think it starts in September. They're pulling that one together right now. We don't have a company program running on Oahu at the moment. COVID kind of kicked us in some weird ways. You don't have the same momentum in the same things. So we had to stop a lot of those long-term hands-on projects and now we're building back into it. I anticipate we'll have that and others going in the next year or two. Marry, we're kind of running out of time here and I want to give you a chance to just say a little more. Your enthusiasm is infectious and I'm sure the kids, the students of all ages, catch that. Are you going to continue doing this or do you think it will run out for you or what's your vision of the future? I've been doing junior achievement for a long time and I've done it in different states too. I used to live on the mainland for some time and I will not stop. I'll do this as long as I can. Okay, well that's terrific. David, again, if just on a mechanical basis, what if I wanted to sign up or if I'm a teacher that wants to get a kit or get a volunteer, I assume I'd start at the website? How does that work? Correct. If you go to our website, jahoai.org. If you go there, there's three different tabs and one of them is if you're an educator. One's if you're, you know, you want to be a volunteer and one if you're actually a student and looking but are donating, I guess maybe it's also a tab on there, please attention. But yeah, you go there and you can from those tabs click through and say, I'm a teacher. I've got these kinds of lessons, these kinds of kids. I want to teach this lesson. All 53 of the overviews of the lessons are on there as well. It's the website has everything you need, jahoai.org. That's pretty simple. I think most of us could find that and I think more people need to know that this is available. Just I had no idea that you could take the lesson plans and go and do your own thing. So that's really terrific. I do want to thank you both. It's been very I've learned things that I didn't know, which is always fun for me. And I'm really honored what you're doing, both Amari, what you're doing, getting out there, you know, in the nitty gritty in the classroom, David, making sure this thing's happening statewide again, which I didn't know. So, you know, one more minute, I'm going to give you each a last minute to say anything you want to say, and then we're going to end the show. So I'll start with David. What's your last word? Everyone listening, jump in. It's not just volunteering, but that's where you really should start. You need to understand the organization you're a part of. And so volunteer once, come learn what we do and then get deeply involved in what we do. Donate or not, still find ways to take advantage of the lessons of things we do and teach the youth around us so we have a stronger future here in Hawaii. Thank you. We do need, we do need a bigger, stronger economy, I think we could all agree. So, Amari, you got the last 60 seconds here. So volunteer, you know, don't be afraid of the kids. They don't judge you. They have fun with you, so why not find out they just get in the classroom? Thank you. Thank you both very much for what you do, for spending this time with us, talking about this huge volunteering opportunity. We'll be back in a couple of weeks on the Hawaii's Volunteer Champions with some new and different volunteers, but you know, this program frankly fills my heart with joy every time I record it. The enthusiasm of volunteers, the dedication of people who are running organizations, probably could be making more money elsewhere, but are doing what they are doing. So I want to thank you both again and thank all of my, both of my regular listeners and anybody else who wandered in. We'll be back. Thank you and aloha.