Toni Rupe on Growing Junior Achievement Across Nebraska

Episode Summary

Toni Rupe leads an organization that decided it was serving too few people. As President and CEO of Junior Achievement of Lincoln, she looked at a map showing roughly seventy Nebraska counties with no Junior Achievement presence and asked a question that turned out to be harder to answer than expected: why not?

The conversation that follows covers what it takes to extend a Lincoln-based nonprofit across a mostly rural state, why a five-million-dollar building turned out to be the wrong idea, and how a village board seat in Ceresco became the leadership training that prepared her for the job she has now.

About Toni Rupe

Toni Rupe is President and CEO of Junior Achievement of Lincoln, which delivers financial literacy, work readiness, and entrepreneurship programs to K-12 students through volunteers drawn from the business community. She joined the organization as Vice President before stepping into the top role.

Her career has been spent almost entirely in education and nonprofits. She moved to Lincoln in 2011 and went to work in the early childhood department at Lincoln Public Schools, starting the day after the district office fire. She later worked in federal grants at LPS and in the foundation at Tabitha before coming to Junior Achievement.

She lives in Ceresco, where she served six years on the village board, including a stretch as its chair.

About the Conversation

Randy Bretz served on the Junior Achievement board years ago, which gives this conversation a long memory. He remembers the transition away from evening meetings where students built and sold a product, and the later shift from paper curriculum packets carried into schools to material delivered online. Toni picks up the story from there.

Much of the discussion turns on a single decision. Junior Achievement of Lincoln had been measuring its success by market share within Lincoln. Toni argued that if the board did not actually care about market share, then the organization had no reason to stop at the county line. Convincing them took time, and expanding required permission from Junior Achievement USA and from neighboring states. Now any student in Nebraska can enter a zip code and reach her office.

Dr. Moore presses on a related point, and Toni agrees with some force: the idea that rural students need less economic education than urban ones gets the situation backward. Farming is an intensely economic occupation. You negotiate prices, manage books, build a relationship with a banker, and work with federal agencies. Nobody should walk into a bank to ask for a loan without knowing what they are talking about.

The most practical decision in the episode may be the one about buildings. Junior Achievement had completed a feasibility study for a permanent JA BizTown facility in 2020, just before the pandemic. Coming out of it, with school transportation harder to arrange and the service area now covering most of the state, Toni concluded that asking students to travel to a building made less sense than bringing the program to them. JA BizTown Mobile packs eighteen storefronts into a setup that goes up in a gym, cafeteria, or library. Sixth graders apply for one of roughly a hundred and twenty jobs, show up in character, and run a small economy for three and a half hours.

Then there is Ceresco. Toni ran for the village board after telling a sitting member that five years was too long to spend raising money for a splash pad. He suggested she put her name on the ballot. She did, did not campaign, was told by her husband that nobody knew who they were, and won. She was nine months pregnant at the time. The splash pad was built.

The Mug

Toni brought a mug with the name Chris on it. It belongs to her father.

Her grandparents had eight children, and their house held a large display of coffee cups — one for each child, then one for each spouse, and eventually one for each grandchild. Anyone who walked through the door pulled their own cup off the wall and knew exactly what to do. No Sharpies, no red Solo cups. Toni could not find hers, so she called her dad and borrowed his.

It prompted Randy to mention the teacups his wife keeps for each of their granddaughters, and a set of tea parties that go with them.