Robin Halsey Wise

Were you ever shocked that some mysterious person known to you only as FICA was snatching a sizable portion of your first paychecks?

Ever write a check with insufficient funds and try to beat it to the bank with a paycheck deposit before it bounced?

Well, then you could have used Robin Halsey Wise, president and CEO of Junior Achievement-Rocky Mountain, which teaches financial literacy and other life skills to young people. Wise, a woman with a stylish blond haircut, is passionate about the program, which is much more cosmic than a course in budgeting.

“I think the big 30,000-foot view of JA is it’s about self-sufficiency and the dignity of work,” Wise tells IWF. “We think that there are three pillars of education that will allow a student to be self-sufficient: understanding how money works (being financially literate), career readiness (knowing how to find and keep a job), and entrepreneurship. This isn’t just knowing how to start a business but having an entrepreneurial mindset. Think about the things you do every day, the ability to cooperate, the curiosity, taking some risks, or being optimistic. Those things I call power skills, and no matter what you do or where you go, if you bring those things with you, you will be successful. So, that’s our North Star.

“There’s an underpinning of freedom and free enterprise. We talk about economic mobility and economic opportunity, and that, in a nutshell, is what we do and who we are. We deliver our program in the classroom during the school day, so we have volunteers who take our curriculum to kindergarten through 12th grade, and they teach these concepts. And it’s all interactive, hands-on, and fun.”

“We think that there are three pillars of education that will allow a student to be self-sufficient: understanding how money works (being financially literate), career readiness (knowing how to find and keep a job), and entrepreneurship.”

“We also have programs that we call experiences where kids come on a field trip—this is for middle school and high schoolers—to our building and participate in a JA Finance Park. Basically, they get to be an adult for the day. Imagine you’re 14 years old and you come to the park. We give you work to do before you come, and there is a curriculum. You understand what a budget is. What’s good credit? What’s bad credit? What’s good use of interest, bad use of interest, good use of credit, bad use of credit? That’s somewhat theoretical. So, then there’s the field trip to our JA Finance Park, and you put all of that into practice. You’re given a tablet, and on that is a randomly assigned job, a salary that you would really get for that kind of a job, you get a credit score, and you get a life situation. Imagine the game of Life on steroids. Kids spend the day at the park making adult decisions about purchases, living within their means. For example, one student’s ‘job’ might be a bank teller, with a $2,000 a month salary. Taxes immediately get taken out, and then what’s left is net monthly income. And from that, the student needs to make all their buying and purchasing decisions. This can be very stressful.”

Robin is so sold on JA because it influenced her life. Wise grew up in Omaha, where her father, who was described as “an entrepreneur at heart,” started a small truck line. “He was quite something,” says Robin. “He was a small business guy. I was the first person in my family to go to college because that just wasn’t the thing in our family.” Robin initially left college without a degree and became a flight attendant. But decided that was not the career for her. She came back to Omaha and remembered her JA volunteer and called him. 

“I credit my JA volunteer with helping me see I needed to finish college to do what I wanted to do,” she says. “I called him and said I had decided that I wanted to get into public relations. And I had no idea what that meant. Bless his heart, he set me up with an interview with a woman who was doing what I thought I wanted to do, and she was everything I wanted to be. She was beautifully dressed and had a corner office, and she chatted with me for a bit, and she said, ‘Honey, you’ve got to finish college. If you want to do what I do, you need a skill, and that skill is writing.’ ”

This time college was different. Robin knew why she was there and what she needed to do to achieve her ambition. While in college, she worked as a bank teller, a DJ in a bar, and at a makeup counter. After graduation, she landed a job at a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in Omaha owned by Warren Buffett. “I was not a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter,” Robin confesses. “I was a terrible, terrible reporter. And I was moved to the marketing department because I was much better at that.”

Robin then worked in public relations for a manufacturing facility, Western Electric, and later for Northern Natural Gas, which became Enron.   

When the oil and gas business hit a big bump in the road in the mid-eighties—“The joke was that you’d rather tell your mom you were a piano player in a whorehouse than tell her you worked in the oil and gas industry,” Robin says. Robin got married, moved to Denver, and made a total career change as vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. “I got to meet everybody in town,” she recalls. And those connections eventually led her to JA. Junior Achievement was in quite a pickle, “It was nearly bankrupt, and they had bounced payroll checks, and the TV station was threatening to do an exposé on an organization that was teaching kids about business but couldn’t run its own business.”

Wise was approached to take over the troubled nonprofit. That was almost 30 years ago, and ever since it’s been “a labor of love,” but it also required toughness. “With a nonprofit, it starts with a board,” Robin explains. “You must recruit a board that’s enthusiastic and you must be enthusiastic, and authentic, and believe in the mission. You can’t just be a hired gun. I started to build my board and set higher expectations of them. A board member must be personally invested in some way. I think I made some people mad. But it is essential to get the right people on the bus and have a real clear North Star for where you are going. Our North Star is free enterprise, opportunity, and freedom.”

Robin is so sold on JA because it influenced her life.

JA-Rocky Mountain is a huge success. It’s projected to reach 83,000 students in 450 Wyoming and Colorado middle and high schools in the 2024-2025 school year. Individual former students attest to the impact that this program has on their lives.  

“There are a couple of what I call ‘pinball moments’ in your life that kind of change your trajectory. Truth be told, JA Business Week was one of those pinball moments for me. My mentor was an entrepreneur, and he inspired me personally to be who I feel called to be,” Michael Taylor, who has a career in real estate, says on the website. 

“I had a girl walk up to me not too long ago,” says Robin, “and she said that she had wanted new shoes. She was back-to-school shopping with her mother and asked for these shoes, and her mom said they couldn’t afford them. She said that she had gotten mad at her mother but, after taking the JA program, that now she knows why.”

Technology means that there are more pitfalls for young people today. “Lots of kids are using debit cards, and that’s immediate. My son had a debit card in college. He used it and would run out of money on his debit card, but it still worked. So, he would buy a hamburger and essentially pay $45 for it because the burger was six bucks, but the overdraft charge on his debit card was $35 or something. And it’s an immediate hit on your credit score.

“There’s an underpinning of freedom and free enterprise. We talk about economic mobility and economic opportunity, and that in a nutshell is what we do and who we are.”

“So, now, the stakes are so much higher for young people to not get in trouble financially, and we think about college loans, debt, bad purchasing decisions that lead to debt, and that keep somebody from building equity or buying a home or starting a business. If the bank sees how bad you’ve been with money, you can’t get a loan and are dependent on people and now you’re asking for a bailout. It’s mentally taxing to have money problems. We have a program called the JA Dream Accelerator, which is an experience where kids come to the JA Free Enterprise Center on a field trip. The idea is to find your path or purpose in life. When you think about the pressure young people are under, like everybody’s telling them you need to go to college, you need to go to college. And it puts so much pressure on them to think they need to know what they need to do, and they don’t know enough about themselves to know.

“We designed this experience—there’s nothing like it in the country—for kids to find out their strengths, what they can do, what they like to do, and how that links with something they could bring to the world. It’s all based on behavioral science. That’s why we designed the JA Dream Accelerator, because college isn’t for everybody. Everybody does not have to go to college, but everybody needs a skill and needs to feel they have purpose. We’re helping kids see their unique strengths and what they can bring to the world. 

Colorado has gone from a red state to a blue state. Does Robin have any theories on why? “I think it was the legalization of marijuana—but what do I know!” 

Robin is married to Steve Wise, who recently sold his company, Gard’N-Wise Distributors, Inc., which distributes garden supplies to commercial and retail nurseries. And there is a media celebrity in the family—Robin is mother-in-law to pundit Guy Benson. Adam Wise, who works at KPMG, and Benson share a son, one-year-old Conrad James Benson-Wise. We had to ask: So, what’s Guy really like? Robin says he is “a great dad” and does a mean charcuterie board.

For those of us who had to find out the hard way who FICA was and that it wasn’t going away: Robin, where were you when we needed you? For the younger generation, which is coming up in a faster, perhaps more challenging world, we’re glad Robin and JA are there to prepare them to make the most of their opportunities.