Lawrence Janesky, founder and president of Basement Systems Inc., reflected on the people and principles that helped him and his basement waterproofing and crawl space repair company to the level of success at which it now stands during his acceptance speech for being conducted into the Connecticut Junior Achievement Hall of Fame.

Junior Achievement (JA) has been educating and inspiring young people to understand business and global economics to improve the quality of their lives. Junior Achievement is the largest non-profit economic education organization with programs taught by classroom volunteers from the business community across America and in more than 100 other countries.

Each year Junior Achievement honors individuals who donate their time and resources to the program. A half-dozen employees from Janesky’s Basement Systems visit area schools to teach the JA program. “The JA program is hugely rewarding,” said Richard Fencil, the Web Markting Director at Basement Systems. “It’s not that I help the students to learn the JA curriculum, it’s the enthusiasm of the students that really shows that this program works. It’s a great feeling.”

Junior Achievement is a volunteer driven, non-profit organization. More than 2,000 business professionals, parents, retirees and college students will enter schools this year to teach the JA programs. Volunteers use personal experiences to make the curricula practical and realistic. Providing children with positive adult role models, who illustrate ways to build self-confidence, develop skills and find avenues of success in a free enterprise system, is the focus of Junior Achievement.

“If every business volunteered a person for a session twice a year, it would make a huge difference,” said Dan Fitzgerald, Director of Marketing at Basement Systems.

The local chapter of Junior Achievement can be found here: http://bridgeport.ja.org/