 Aloha and welcome to this week's edition of Business in Hawaii. I'm Daelyn Yanagida and we are broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com. While there, please subscribe to our programs and get on our mailing list. The theme of Business in Hawaii is to share with you stories of local businesses by local people. Our guests share with us their journey to building successful businesses right here at home. In the ThinkTech studio today is Nathan Giotoku, president of Junior Achievement of Hawaii. Nate, thank you so much for joining me today. Junior Achievement of Hawaii is near and dear to my heart, as you know. And I would love for you to share all that's been going on with Jay Hawaii. But before we do that, I know that you're familiar face around town. Sure. And I would love for you to tell us what you've been up to. Well, thank you very much for having me today. You know, I'm with Junior Achievement of Hawaii, and I started there in late April. And prior to Junior Achievement, I was at Kupu, which is another nonprofit here in Hawaii, which focused mainly on empowering young adults to get jobs in conservation and sustainability work. So while there, I learned a lot about nonprofits, especially running multiple programs. That plus my involvement with the Japanese community at the Japanese Cultural Center and the Junior Chamber of Commerce all kind of led me toward a career nonprofit. Well, clearly also your passion for issues and work that focuses around our young people has been the center of what you do at Junior Achievement, but also while you're at Kupu. I'd love for you to tell us about Junior Achievement of Hawaii. I mean, I know they've been around for some time, but since when and what's the evolution? Yeah, absolutely. So yes, my personal mission has always been to help Hawaii. And even when I was in the private sector, it was about helping my customers to be able to succeed so they can employ more people. And when I dove into nonprofit work, I kind of naturally went toward the youth engagement part. And Junior Achievement's been around in Hawaii since 1957. Since 1957, we've impacted roughly 273,000 people, so a quarter of a million people in Hawaii have gone through JA. And over the years, we've had a long lasting impact. A lot of our alumni are in the community now as business leaders. And we continue to do the work. So right now we're statewide on Kauai, Oahu, the big island, and this year we'll go back to Maui. And we're out there working with businesses to volunteer and get into the classrooms and just get in front of students, teaching them about economics, personal finance, entrepreneurship, and getting them ready to enter their career. So I know that a lot of those topics are within your grain. I mean, you're an entrepreneur prior to Kuku, right? You yourself started up a business. And so I think that the connection between being an entrepreneur in Hawaii, being born and raised in Hawaii, and the connection between Junior Achievement just sparked your passion for our mission. So I do have a long history in entrepreneurship. My families, they've always owned their own business. And part of what we do at JA is to empower young people to have the tools to make that self-determinative decision to do what they want, whether it's to go into a career working for someone or go off and start their own company. So a lot of that all folds into what we teach at JA. And it's about giving our youth the tools in order to determine their own path forward in the future. For me, Hawaii is a very small business state. Our largest employers are hotels or banks. We don't have large corporations. So a lot of it will be people who are wanting to open up their own business and kind of have a small business on their own. So I know that a lot of folks probably have heard of Junior Achievement, but what does Junior Achievement really do? So what we do is we actually are a volunteer organization. So our key to our success is connecting community volunteers mostly from businesses and giving them the opportunity to enter our classrooms to go and teach the kids directly. So we don't actually do a lot of the teaching ourselves. We actually work and recruit new volunteers, work with companies to get them to do some outreach. And then we go and provide the materials, provide the curriculum, which is all standard space. So it fits well into public school. And we provide the training to the volunteers. And then we match the volunteers with schools and get them out into the community. So really, the volunteers are the lifeblood of what we do. And what's beautiful about the curriculum with Junior Achievement is that you folks are synced up with the Department of Labor, the U.S. Department of Labor. And as well as the Department of Education here, I know that there's some partnerships there. Can you tell us about that? Absolutely. So an advantage for J is that we are a national organization. So a lot of our curriculum is supported on a national level on Department of Labor, Department of Education. We adhere to pretty much every state's standards, whether they be Common Core or their own standards. Hawaii, we're switching to Common Core, but we adhere to that. And what we try to do with the DOE here locally is to find opportunities, especially on the high school level, to kind of dive deeper and kind of connect partners with the right school. For instance, we're going to pilot a program in Kalahill this year where we're trying to connect their engineering pathway to engineers. So we want the engineering firms to come and teach the classes, the work career readiness classes for those engineering students, so that the students get to interact with possible future employers or fellow employees and really get to know if that's the choice they want to make and if that field is right for them. So we want to connect them early and kind of build those relationships. So we're testing that out this year and hopefully that'll expand in the future. Speaking of students, I'd love to talk about your reach, German. I think we have a slide that'll speak to that. Yes, so in 2018-2019, we just finished, we wrapped up the school year and we reached 7,948 students across the state in Oahu, East Hawaii and Ankuwa'i. And the numbers are up there, 359 classes, 71 schools, 93 percent of those schools are public schools and of those about one third, little over a third, we're Title I schools. So Title I schools are schools that qualify a percentage of their students qualify for free or reduced lunches. So they're typically in an economically disadvantaged position. So a lot of our work is in there and we had over 500 volunteers. So those 500 volunteers put in hundreds of thousands of hours in the classroom. So our reach is pretty wide considering how small of a nonprofit we actually are. So the schools that participate in classroom programs with junior achievement, not necessarily Title I, right? No, not at all. So who can? Anybody can participate. So we encourage educators to go to our website and they can actually request a program. At that point, what we do, the process is we'll talk to the teacher, see what they're looking for, and then what we do after that is try to engage our volunteers and try to fill the space. If we can get a volunteer to fill that class, then we'll book the class and make that arrangement. If we cannot, then we let the teacher know that we're short of volunteers so we cannot fill it. But the teachers are out there driving it. We'd like to get, you know, we're trying to, we have programs from K to 12. So every grade could have a program. So we'd like to see it at some point where at a school, every grade has AJA program running. So that's what we're driving toward. You know, teaching today is probably easily one of the hardest jobs out there. It takes a tremendous amount of dedication and commitment from our teachers, bless their hearts for educating our young people. And when junior achievement can come in and support them in their curriculum, it gives them an opportunity to take some time to think about themselves, because can you explain to us how a classroom looks? And I think we have a couple of slides to talk to as well. Yeah, so the community volunteers will actually come in and teach the class. So really, the teacher doesn't get a day off, but they get a little break. And then, you know, we do have the teachers usually helping our volunteers with classroom control and helping as an assistant. A lot of our volunteers, that's not their profession. So they're just as uncomfortable teaching the class. But you know, we provide all of the materials. So all of that's included and free to the classroom. So all of these classes don't have to pay for any of the materials. We provide everything. We provide the volunteers the handbooks that they can just basically read through and the curriculum step by step. And I taught my own class one a few months ago. I taught some second graders and it's great. It's a great experience. I think for the kids, having another voice also gives them a mental break and they're able to absorb because they're not talking to somebody different. And you know, they can deliver that message. Some of the programs that we run are multiple days. So for instance, that second grade class would have been about two or three sessions of classes that I would have gone to. So it does vary. Sometimes you can squish them all into an afternoon, but it kind of depends on the teacher. But yeah, so the teacher gets a sharp little break. Our community volunteers get to come in the class and they get to actually empathize with the teacher and feel it's like to be up in front of kids. But also the kids get a different experience. They get a secondary voice talking to them and they seem to like that and can absorb that well. Fantastic. So Junior Achievement of Hawaii works together with the teachers in the school to bring programming. So tell me about the different types of program. You said you provide programs from K through 12. Yes. I mean, are we talking financial education at kindergarten? How does that progress? Absolutely. So we do provide classes from K to 12. Every grade level kind of has a different topic. On the elementary school level, we really talk about basic economics. We talk about what are companies, what is supply and demand, what is being an employee mean, what is paying your taxes, how do we afford police, what we have to pay taxes. So we kind of cover all these basic, basic community level economics with elementary school children. And then as they get older, we start to kind of specialize them in a few different ways. So our main three pillars are entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and work readiness. So as they get older, those programs kind of dive in deeper on specific items. So it really depends on the schools and what the community needs are. They're hearing a lot of community requests for work readiness and entrepreneurship. So it seems to be, those seems to be the classes that the high schools are requesting or middle schools are requesting more geared toward entrepreneurship and toward career readiness. So it's the teachers or the schools that determine at what point they're ready to talk about career readiness or entrepreneurship, not necessarily what is prescribed? Yeah, or it can work the other way too. It can work both ways. I think for us, so certain levels of our programming are really geared toward second graders. And we have a program called the Global Marketplace, which would be more geared toward sixth graders because they understand things are different in a different country and they can kind of understand global economics a little better. And then when we get to the high school level, it's a lot deeper and it's doing problem solving, conflict mediation, communication, as well as basic balancing your checkbook and being fiscally responsible. So it varies, but the way the curriculum is structured is that it really is geared toward specific age levels, but we do let the schools kind of drive to us and say, like, hey, we heard about this program, you know, we want to try this out at our school. So that's kind of how the career success program came up with Kalaheo. We wanted to, we were looking for a partner as far as the CTE work, career technical education work. They were ready to get involved and we're looking to launch sometime this year. Nice. I know that junior achievement of Hawaii has been very active with its community partners. And when we come back from break, I would love for you to share with us how that involvement looks and how far it reaches. We are going to take that short break. This is business in Hawaii. Aloha, I'm Stan Osterman, Stan the Energy Man, every Friday here on Think Tech, Hawaii. If you're really interested in finding out what's going on in energy, especially here in Hawaii, but also all the way around the world, and especially if it has to do with hydrogen, look into Stan the Energy Man every Friday, 12 o'clock, Think Tech, Hawaii. Be there, aloha. Konnichiwa. Think Tech, Hawaii ga nihongo de oguri shite imasu. Konnichiwa, Hawaii. Post no kunisei ikari desu. Mai shu, kakushuu getsu youbi. Niji kara desu ne. Nihongo de, nihongo de katsuyaku sarete irassharu. Hawaii no irona gata wo manekishite shou wo, guest shou wo otodoke shite imasu. Zehi koran ni natte kudasai. Welcome back. This is business in Hawaii. And with us today is Nate Gyotoku, President of Junior Achievement of Hawaii. Nate, when we left to break, we were talking about the different types of programming that happens and at the grade level and how that's dispersed, whether it's driven by the school or the educator or whether Junior Achievement can provide some guidance in a prescribed curriculum. We know that Junior Achievement is also very active in the community with some really significant supporters. Tell us about some of your community partners. Absolutely, so being a financial literacy organization, we have great support from a lot of our local banks. So Bank of Hawaii, American Savings, Central Pacific, First Hawaiian Bank, they're all big supporters of us. Finance Factors is also a supporter. And now along with that, we're also engaged with other just regular companies. People who are companies that are now starting to encourage their employees to get out into the community to volunteer. So we have other partners like Cervco and Alexander and Baldwin. And so we're always building new partners. But for us, yeah, we definitely am always looking for more companies to partner with. We like to take a company approach because then at that point, companies can kind of self-organize and say, okay, well, we like this school or we want to take care of this school. So let's concentrate our efforts at a school in our neighborhood or in a certain area. And it allows us to also organize our volunteers a little better when we have like one point of contact at say a bank. And we can shoot them an email and say, here are the open classes that we need help with and they can help us fill. So our community partners are very, very important to us. And we have statewide, because we operate statewide, we also have partners on Kaua'i, partners in Hilo, looking to build out more partners on Maui and on the west side of the Big Island too. So as we expand, we're always looking for new partnerships. So I also know that, and because this is another organization that's near and dear to my heart, that you partner with SHRM and that's the Society of Human Resources Managers. And they really key into the work readiness piece. Tell us about some of the work that you're gonna do with SHRM. Yeah, so SHRM is part of that Kaua'i Hilo pilot. So SHRM is a big partner for us. Obviously, you know, HR, every company has HR. So being associated and being connected to SHRM really gets our foot in at a lot of companies and they have a really large membership. So with SHRM, what we're doing is we kind of sectioned off the project with Kaua'i Hilo. Kaua'i Hilo will provide us the students and the place to teach them. We'll provide the content and then we're working with SHRM to help us find the volunteers. So basically, we're kind of divvying up the responsibilities as best as we can, but we're finding that some of these associations like SHRM are really important. We're looking at building out other ones with different professional organizations as well. But yeah, it gets us into the door. It helps us recruit new volunteers. It organizes us better. It allows us to be, still say small on a staff size, but still increase our reach really, really quickly. Let's talk a little bit more about your approach. I know that you brought a slide with you today to talk to that. Sure, so our approach is pretty simple. Like I mentioned earlier, our three main pillars that we, our pathways that we're concentrating on are entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and career readiness. So as I mentioned, we have programs for kindergarten all the way to 12th grade. What we do is we kind of view the kindergarten, the K-5 programming as foundational. So they're very broad, very basic, teaches kids the very basic stuff, including like needs versus wants. So hopefully simple things like that. But we find that those things lay a foundation so that as they get older, depending which way they wanna go, or like where we're approaching it, what the community kind of feels that they need, they can kind of, we can have programs that fit into either one or two or one, a couple of them fit into all three of the different pathways. But that way we can kind of focus our efforts a little better, especially like if a school really wants to go toward career readiness, and they're really trying to build out their CTE platform, which is mostly career readiness, then we can plug into that and we can say, well, we have this whole book of curriculum that fit that. Other schools might be more into entrepreneurship and design thinking, great, we can plug into our entrepreneurship cycle there. So we kind of view it as a way to be able to hit all the elementary schools and basically whatever the elementary school kids learn as they get older, if we can stay in that district, they'll get to focus on another pillar more deeply. And so then it'll roll into middle school and high school and what the intent is, is for them to be able to have a full JA experience. Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately our goal is to work district by district and have a class in every grade within a district so that a student might have had JA programming all the way through. I mean, that would be ideal for us and we're working toward that now. But yeah, that's the idea, is that we can build these modules and kind of get them to where they need to be. I think the curriculum in and of itself is just amazing. I've had an opportunity to get into a third grade class which was really intimidating. And the curriculum was so well drawn out that even if I've never taught a class in my life, the guides and the activities that they put into place for the kids, just amazing. So what I thought was very valuable was in this third grade class, we talked about how to balance a checkbook, right? So really bringing them to the basics of how finances are managed at the very basic level. Those experiences are amazing. Tell me about the volunteer-based people who get into your classrooms. How do they get to you? Where do you find them? Absolutely, so as we mentioned earlier, we depend on our community partners so that's one way we get volunteers. So a lot of that involves me getting out there and talking to different companies and encouraging them to work with us. Otherwise, if people are interested, they can go to our website. There's a link, www.jahawaii.org. There's a link on the bottom to volunteer. And basically what we do is it's basically a signup sheet and we add you to our list and try to find a school in your area. Maybe it's closer to home, on the way home from work or whatever it is that you can work in. And yeah, from the experience is really, really easy for a volunteer. Everything's in the kit. We provide all the materials, including if there's any pens and coloring stuff, all that stuff's included crayons. So a lot of the activities are hands-on, which the kids love. I think if you saw in some of those pictures we posted, they're standing up, they're moving around, they're kind of having fun. So it's a lot of it's hands-on learning and using games and other things to kind of teach economics, which can be kind of boring. But all of that's included in the kit. So basically once a volunteer gets assigned to a class, we send them the materials they need and if they have questions we'll do some training but usually they can rip it open, read the little magazine and they're good to go. There are opportunities for customization. I think when a lot of our financial professionals in the community get into a classroom, connection just comes alive about talking about what they do, about what the passion is and whether it's banking or financial planning or whatever that is. Is there an opportunity? Absolutely. So every class that we teach, we always encourage the volunteers to weave their story into the curriculum. So we don't want them to just read off the book and just kind of be a robot that defeats the purpose. They're there because they have their own personal experience whether it be in banking, some of them are HR professionals, some of them are marketing, whatever it is. We want them to weave their experiences into the curriculum and tell stories from their own experience. If they're talking about balancing their checkbook, maybe they can talk about, when they're younger they bounce the check and this happened and they can bring that up and teach the kids from their own experience. So we do want customization. A lot of the actual customization happens on the teacher level too. Sometimes they're constrained by time. So we'll work with the teacher to figure out, well, okay, we can get through these sections but maybe we might not hit this one. For example, that Kala Hill program, we actually met with the teacher and we were able to figure out, okay, this stuff she's already covering in another on her own so maybe we'll take it out to save some time and then and do the rest of the JA curriculum. So yeah, it's very customizable but the volunteers is what brings the content alive. I mean, we could go and teach the teachers to do it but getting real world volunteers who have experience in the field and can share a couple of stories about what they're doing really makes a difference. And so that commitment about an hour or? Yeah, it could be about an hour, it depends and again, it varies on actual class and the volunteer what they can provide. Some classes will have multiple volunteers cover one class. So if for instance, we don't think if it's a five hour or five section class and one volunteer can't cover all five, maybe there might be two or three volunteers that can tag team and finish that out. One of the things that you mentioned to us early on in the interview is that all the classroom materials curriculum free. So whether it's a public school, whether it's a private school, whether it's a private entity that's interested in classes, free, really? Free, yes. So we provide all the materials for free again and plus the volunteers are providing their time to the class. So it's a total benefit for the schools. We rely heavily on our fundraising efforts and some grants, community support to be able to provide this service to the state. And we feel it's an important service. I mean, we've been around for a long time and I think people kind of forgot or forget about JA sometimes, but we've been there the whole time kind of cranking over the last 60 years. And so a lot of it, we depend on a lot of that community support to be able to go to a school and say, hey, look, you don't have to pay for any of these materials. You just carve out some time for us and our volunteer and we can impact your students. A junior achievement is just so many things. We're in the classrooms, but there are also other programs that junior achievement does. Can you tell us about some of those other programs? Sure, you know, we're in the classrooms. Some of the other stuff that we do are outside of classrooms. Like we run a company program in Hilo where it's basically a multi-week simulation of high school students trying to run their own company from start to finish. Gives them a good example or a good taste of what entrepreneurship looks like. But we also do fundraisers outside which helps us fund all of these things for free. We have a Hall of Fame dinner in May that's coming up. We also have a brewer festival in Kauai in April and Hilo has the company program and they also have their own fundraiser dinner there. So a lot of our efforts outside are doing that. And we're always looking to do more. So I think in the next year or two we'll probably have more activities that involve the wider community. I knew this would happen, but we're running out of time. I also know that you run a job shadow program that would give students a great opportunity to get into local businesses, is that right? Yes, so one of the programs in our work readiness track is the job shadow program. And it's a one day program where we try to bring students to a company and they get to go and see what people are doing. So we're planning to do that with that engineering group. It's sort of the career success program plus job shadow. We're hoping at the end we can get those kids out to the engineering offices and actually see what an engineer does on a day-to-day basis. That's awesome. I want to give you an opportunity to tell your audience how to get involved if it's volunteerism, whether they wanna donate, whether they want programming to come into their schools. Please tell us how to get in touch with you. Great, well thanks again for having me. You can go to www.jahawaii.org for everything. You can go there to sign up for new programs. If you're an educator, you can go there to make a donation which is always very appreciative. And you can also go there to become a volunteer which we also need. So everything's on our website. Please follow us on social media. We're up there. All of those links are on our website as well. Fantastic. Hey Nate, congratulations on taking on this endeavor and being committed to educating our young people. Just amazing work that you're doing. We are out of time, but again, thank you to Nathan and Junior Achievement of Hawaii for joining us. And a big thank you to the production staff here that does an amazing job. If you would like to be a guest on the show, please hit the like button and subscribe and leave a comment below. Business in Hawaii airs every Thursday at 2 p.m. and we look forward to seeing you here next week.