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JA India Newsletter
Volume 1, Issue 3 |
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| The 10K Milestone |
December 2008 |
Greetings!
As each us await the transition to 2009, at JA India this transition signifies an additional milestone along a longer journey. 
JA India commenced first round of classroom operations, in Bangalore, in January 2007. Since then JA India has reached ~8,500 students through in-classroom programs and another 1,500 students through non-classroom programs. On a very conservative basis 100,000+ student interaction hours were invested in helping bridge the gap between our classrooms and the real world. Several individuals, driven by their own unqiue sense of mission, made this possible. A thank you would never be enough yet we would forever remain thankful to each one of you.
A range of thoughts and experiences pass-by as we pause for a moment to take a brief look back. The overwhelming feeling, in each of us at JA India, nonetheless is -- Atbest the journey has just begun. With an average of 200 mn students in our country, 10K is not even a rounding off error!
As individuals and institutions come to terms with the unravelling recession, India perhaps is being perceived as part of the world's solution. Much as we would like to believe we are living in the best times ever, the divide between the "Haves" and "Have Nots" continues to be an overpowering reality. For the good times to last, this gap needs to be closed. Whose responsibility is it? Where do we start? No! we dont have the answers.
However, we do believe whatever be the solution, for the individual the operating priority would be: Discover and reach your potential. Find out what are you designed to do best and give it your best shot. Spectacular changes can happen if the individuals believe in their potential.
Our endeavour is to work with today's students who are getting ready to manage the affairs of the world. We believe each of these students has the potential to turn things around and create a beautiful and just world. Our role is limited to hand holding these agents of change. Actually, they really do not need anything more dramatic. After engaging with 10,000 of them, we believe they have immense fire in them, their courage is unmatched, their passion undying, they are sensitive to their surroundings yet they probably need a helping hand that builds the faith in their dreams.
We just started along this journey. A long lever and a place to rest it can topple the planet yet it still needs the pair of hands at the lever.
JA would like to appeal to parents, teachers, guardians and everybody who has an influence on today's students to come together and help put wind beneath the wings of these future citizens. Our students need the impetus to help them soar and soar well. Lets reach out to them. And in this pursuit will these students be truly successful in their lives. To make a beginning let the students unleash their thoughts and for a change let us all hear them.
Sucharita Selot
Region Head (North), JA India |
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| Our Sponsors |
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 Founders Board
Changes
Ashish Bajaj, Managing Director, Global Transaction Services and Commercial Banking, Citi, South Asia joins JA India Founders Board.
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 JA Volunteering
Cognizant Chennai
Within an year of commnecing the first classroom program, Cognizant Chennai volunteers reach JACareers with a Purpose program to more than 1000 chennai school students. |
Volunteer Engagement
Volunteer led training
HSBC Chennai volunteer, Anand Vijayaraghavan now helps train new volunteers. The most recent training session was conducted by Anand for new volunteers from Murugappa group, Chennai.
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 Program Partnerships
HSBC Global Signature Program
The initiative is part of a larger three-year, $3.4 million partnership between HSBC Holdings plc and JA WorldwideŽ to teach basic financial skills to school children.
JA More than Money has been put through initial trials in Mumbai (~50 students | Grade VII) and Chennai (30 students | Grade V). The program is expected to expand to around 3,000 children in its first year of implementation.
The program aims to teach students from Grades VII / VIII about earning, spending, sharing and saving money. Students are encouraged to use innovative thinking to learn money-management skills that support positive attitudes as they explore and enhance their career aspirations.
Students also develop a better understanding of the relationship between what they learn at school and their successful participation in the economy.
The classroom sessions are conducted by HSBC volunteers.
BridgeIT Employability Program: EMC JA India partnership
The BridgeIT India Employability Program is a joint initiative between EMC and Junior Achievement India, and seeks to increase the employability of Indian engineering students by providing them with an operational understanding of what to expect at an IT organization, and how to contribute from the
first day on the job.
The program also saves employers from having to create lengthy and expensive orientation programs for new hires. The program involves volunteers from EMC India Center of Excellence engaging with engineering  students aspiring for a career in the Indian IT industry. In the first phase of the program, agreements have been reached with four engineering/ technical colleges that are striving to establish themselves as leading technology institutions in Bangalore.
Programs for first two batches (Global Academy of Technology and Garden City College Bangalore) totaling 130 students concluded. All classroom sessions conducted by EMC volunteers.
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JA Student Company Program
JA India's student company program continues to find interest from students and educators. In brief about three of the current 4 programs:
InsPIRATED | Vivek High School | CHANDIGARH
Setup, managed and operated by class XI students. Their revenue and profit target: INR 2.85L and INR 1.05L  respectively. More information available at InsPIRATED
Now that these students are already running their own 'real' company, they keenly await their visit to KPMG Delhi to understand what commerce professionals do in 'the real' companies.
Vivek High School has also qualified as the first school in India to be awarded the JA India Student Company program license.
Brownie Inc | R.N. Podar School | MUMBAI
Setup, managed and operated by class XI students, this student company is in the business of making cookies. Still  at a nascent stage, the company has already grossed revenue of INR 5K and made a profit of INR 1K. The aMAISing Store | Mallya Aditi School | BANGALORE
Setup, managed and operated by 14 high school students of Mallya Aditi School, this student batch would also be the  first JA India student company program batch to appear for CIE's Young Enterprise examination.
The company grossed revenues of INR 2.45L and made a profit of INR 1.20L. |
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Events
Global Entrepreneurship Week
Global Entrepreneurship Week is the first-ever international celebration of enterprise. 
During 17th-23rd November 2008, millions of people around the world joined a growing movement of entrepreneurial people, to unleash their enterprising ideas to make a profit and address society's biggest issues. Thousands of activities planned in more than 75 countries around the world - all with the goal to inspire young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity and to encourage them to think big, to turn their ideas into reality, and to make their mark.
JA India played the role of the national co-host in India. Staying focused on students -- who continue to be the focus of JA India, a series of events were conducted as a part of this movement. For more on the events please refer the links GEW Bangalore and GEW Hyderabad.
JA India's GEW events in Hyderabad were anchored and sponsored by Deloitte U.S. in India. Deloitte volunteers program managed the Hyderabad program. |
Events
IIM Indore | Kalpavriksha | Business Case Challenge
More than a dozen teams from Business schools such as IIMA, XLRI, SP Jain etc participating in the Deloitte sponsored IIM Indore Social Venture Challenge 'Kalpavriksha' competed in the 'JA India Business Case Challenge'. Teams presented their strategies and recommendations on JA India's strategic priorities.
The competition was judged by Raj Ivaturi (Deloitte) and Venkat Matoory (JA India).
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Student Educator Industry Interaction
EMC's symposium @ NMAMIT
JA India engaged with students and faculty at EMC sponsored symposium held at NMAMIT, Mangalore on 4 December 2008.
Speaking at the event as a keynote speaker, Venkat Matoory of JA India shared his thoughts on Employability and the role students and educators could play in effecting a better learning attitude towards redressing some of the employability gaps.
The theme progressed further with a panel discussion on extent of leverage curriculum offered in redressing employability gaps.
The panelists included Prof S Sadagopan (Director, IIIT Bangalore), Pankaj Dikshit (General Manager, NIIT), Karthik Padmanabhan (Owner, ThinkVarsity), Venkat Matoory (Executive Director, JA India) and Kalyan Kumar Banerjee (Senior Vice President, MindTree) More information available at ICSST 08 |
Educator Connect
JA India Teacher Certification Program (TCP)
JA India, with the support of industry volunteers, aspires to train and equip participating teachers registering for this program to conduct JA India programs for their respective academic institutions' students. As a part of the certification process, participating teachers who successfully complete the training process and subsequently conduct minimum requisite live classroom batches satisfactorily, would be formally certified to conduct JA India programs.
Deloitte JA India Educator meet | 21 Oct 2008
The Educator connect initiatives were rolled out in Hyderabad with Deloitte volunteers hosting the first Deloitte JA India Educators meet.
On this day, Deloitte volunteers and JA India engaged with more than 25 educators from 14 schools in Hyderabad to share information on Deloitte CSR initiatives and JA India programs/educator initiatives. Detailed feedback was sought from educators on JA India programs/initiatives.
Teacher Certification Program launch | 14 Nov 08As a next step, Teacher training program conducted for first batch of educators participating in Teacher Certification program.
The first Hyderabad TCP classroom training batch initiated in Bharatiya Vidya Bhavans School on 29 Nov 08.
MUMBAI
JA India rolled out TCP in Mumbai at R.N. Podar School, Santa Cruz. Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Region Head (West), JA India is trainer for the Mumbai TCP rollout. |
Turf Talk
Place for Volunteers', Parents', Educators', Students' speak
JA: Step towards involving parents for better impact
-- Written by a JA Volunteer and a parent
In this era of high level education and stress on 95% scores in exams, it is important for schools to involve parents in school activities to some extent. In June 08, Sri Rajdhani Residential School in Hyderabad, conducted their first ever Parent teacher meeting.
The idea of bringing parents and teachers together in form of a parent teacher association (PTA) was to understand parents' expectations from teachers and the school. At the same time, understand how parents can support the teachers to provide their children a good learning experience -- studies being just one part of such experience.
One JA volunteer, who was also a parent in that meeting, worked with the teachers to make this meeting more productive. Parents are more willing to listen to another parent (as an unbiased person), when he/she is not a teacher in that school.
After taking inputs from parents, the volunteer was called upon to talk to the parents to explore how they could help the students. For a long time there was no response from the parents. The JA volunteer (and parent) then shared examples on how people from different professions could provide insights to students from their respective fields.
They could conduct brief awareness session(s) in school, take them on visits and that even the school could support such activities. One parent, who was a store manager, thought he could not be of much help to students. When the JA volunteer asked about the various aspects involved in store keeping and the process followed in their factory from procurement department to receipts to store to indents and so on, the parent was excited to talk more and was willing to share this information in any form with the students -- if that could help.
Women audience felt since they were housewives they could not be of any worthwhile contribution. Thanks to the helpful situation from the store manager example, one lady tentatively asked, if the rest of us thought it be of any help for kids to visit a water filtration plant. If so, she could check with husband to obtain permissions. Another lady joined by aking if the kids knew how the sweet portion in toothpaste was made? Whether they might be interested to see the process? Everyone agree. The Principal was soon busy making notes.
Post the meeting, the parent who suggested a visit to the water filtration plant, worked closely with school management and arranged for a study tour for students from class V through X. This visit happened on 1st Nov 2008. Students were taken to Singoor dam, water filtration unit and also a weaving unit. Parents took the responsibility of obtaining approvals, organizing food for students during the visit -- though the expenses were paid by the school.
What catches attention is the spirit with which parents joined teachers in providing a practical learning opportunity to the children. Several more parents promised to put their efforts for all-round benefit of students and provide them with more information in fields that they had experience in. Suggestions included offers to teach crafts to students, a session on aeronautics and railways (overview of the industries), information on what "marketing" means and so on. Some ex-students too came forward to share their experiences.
We hope this practice will help reduce communication gap between parents and teachers and help foster a common and better understanding on what could be good options for their respective children.
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2008 raised a question!
Recently during a visit to a school, the students told us they are eager to go and see a real life organization. They wanted to know what happens in there. The teachers told us, 'Doesn't matter which part of this country, just tell us where to come and we will get our kids to be there for such an opportunity.' Now this school is in a well to do city. With so much talk on students being bookish and not having real life understanding, that there is so much zeal to explore and understand the 'real' should have resulted in instantaneous chemistry with the 'real world'. Why then did these students and teachers find it so difficult to fulfill their seemingly simple desire? And that too for several years?
Perhaps 2009 would have the answers.
Whatever you wished for your dear ones and yourself...
Junior Achievement India team wishes and prays...
2009 delivers this for you.
With gratitude:
Afroz Khan, Kamal Kiran | (Bangalore)
Fredrick Amalraj, Mohan Raj (Chennai)
Junita Paul and Sucharita Selot (India) | (NCR)
Ramlath Kavil and Ramesh Krishnamurthy (India) | (Mumbai)
Venkat Matoory | (India)
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JA Titan India Business Challenge
2009 |
Game format
Students assume functional roles within smaller teams, where the team as a whole makes quarterly business decisions to achieve the business objective of becoming the 'Best Performing Business', which is measured by a 'Performance Index'. Teams should decipher the drivers of performance and their relative importance based on their individual and comparative company analysis.
Click on image below for more information.
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Registrations open . Stay updated. Get your teams and friends to JA Titan challenge page. |
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