Conversation with the talented and charismatic Shanna Ebeling today who is busy turning Cleveland's Junior Achievement organization into a national model.
With over 1,500 mentors and hundreds of business partners, they bring entrepreneurship literacy into high school classrooms, an incredibly valuable effort for any region seeking to transform economic justice and development. They bring the skill, will and networks to schools that these systems are too burdened to engage.
Gallup data still indicates that entrepreneurship ventures are the key driver of jobs in communities. New jobs are least likely to be produced by big business and government institutions. If we're going to invest in a sustainable future, it must focus significantly in this kind of education that produces citizens capable of the kind of internal locus of control that leads to financially literate and economically engaged contributors to community quality of life indicators.