Seventy-five years ago, JA of Georgia was founded, initially focusing on after-school programs where students crafted items like birdhouses and ashtrays to sell, instilling an entrepreneurial spirit in 1949's high schoolers.

However, during the same time period, Georgia's education landscape faced challenges with segregated schools and disparities in resources. Not until 1949, with the Minimum Foundation Program, was a uniform nine-month school term mandated. To address funding gaps, the Georgia General Assembly passed a 3% sales tax to help support schools.

Fast-forward to the early 2010s; when JA of Georgia collaborated with education and business partners to address income mobility, career-readiness gaps, and middle school engagement decline.  These priorities became the impetus for establishing JA of Georgia’s first Discovery Center, founded by the Chick-fil-A Foundation in 2013. The excitement of what a JA Discovery Center could offer our young people, as well as the business and education sectors, took flight! 

Two years later, Gwinnett County provided the capital to build the second JA Discovery Center in the state. In 2017, philanthropists Mike and Lynn Cottrell provided the capital funding for a third JA Discovery Center in Forsyth County, and in 2020, Engineered Floors provided the capital resources needed to construct the fourth in Dalton. As the appetite for JA’s programs has grown across the state, so has JA’s expansion to reach Georgia’s students.

On the heels of opening the JA Colonial Group Discovery Center in Savannah in 2022, funding emerged from the Columbia County and Richmond County school systems to build the latest center in the Augusta area, which opened several months ago. With these 6 centers, JA now serves nearly 50% of middle school students across the state.

Simultaneously, JA developed the 3DE education model to re-engineer high school. This program offers high school students a modified curriculum that incorporates into the classroom important business and soft skills needed for today’s workplace. Georgia now has 15 schools using this model.

Though much has changed since 1949, JA remains dedicated to inspiring and preparing Georgia’s youth for success in a global economy…and in life.