• HSBC Bangalore commenced classroom volunteering with their first JA More than Money program for middle grade students at Silicon City School  (Indiranagar). This school teaches children from underserved communities and is supported by The Sal Sabeel Trust. Mahesh Sanghavi (SVP and Regional Head | South India | HSBC) champions the JA cause at HSBC Bangalore.
• More than 300 students participated in JA More than Money classroom programs across multiple schools over May and June 2009. This also included classroom sessions conducted  by graduate student volunteers. Buoyed by this success, JA Bangalore team is now in the process of enlisting more student volunteers for conducting middle grade classroom programs. The team has commenced interactions with about 100 NSS students at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore for enlisting more student volunteers.
• Caterpillar volunteers commenced their next batch of JA Caterpillar Industry program for 70 II Year B.Com. students at St. Joseph's College, Bangalore 
• Initial assessment visit to Association of People with Disability Bangalore to evaluate JA Company program for APD's students 

CHENNAI

• Cognizant volunteers re-commence JA Careers with a Purpose program for Montfort School Students. The school feels that the students who went through the program last year are getting better marks and that the program has made a discernible impact on them.

Ravi Nandyala (Cognizant) with educators

 

• Cognizant senior volunteers Ravi Nandyala and Mathivanan Elangovan anchored orientation programs for lecturers at Patrician College, Adyar and Hindu College, Avadi respectively. They spoke about the education system in the context of industries and the need to keep industries in focus while preparing students.
  
  • Observations from the sessions: Academic staff need to develop a broader view of professions. Primary concern is to complete university syllabus. Creative teaching involving industry participation perceived to be time and effort consuming, therefore not very welcome. While academics appreciate need for industry oriented teaching, limited to no materialization of the thought in classrooms

 Mathivanan Elangovan (Cognizant) debriefing Cognizant and MphasiS volunteers

• HSBC Chennai volunteers conduct JA More than Money program for more than 200 students at Good Shepherd School and AMM Foundation School
  • An independent third party participated in live classroom sessions, collected student and volunteer feedback on the program through focus group discussions and collected educator and sponsor feedback through one-on-one interviews.
  • The videos of classroom sessions, student and volunteer feedback, educator and sponsor interviews would be made available on the JA India portal soon.

• Volunteer orientation/debrief session conducted for 35 volunteers from MphasiS -- An EDS Company. Nineteen of them attended live classroom sessions as observers on 20/27 June 09 at Montfort School, Chennai.

• Presentation on JA programs made to about 20 HR Heads from various Murugappa Group companies during a dinner meeting at Madras Cricket Club. The presentation was made by Mr. Swamy (HR, Murugappa Group). We thank Mr. Sridhar Ganesh, Director (HR), Murugappa Group for hosting the event.

• Post vacation breaks, classroom programs have commenced across 3 schools.
• HSBC Mumbai volunteers re-commence JA More than Money classroom programs for 2 student batches
• JA Mumbai successfully concludes its first JA Success Skills program.
• Barclays and Junior Achievement's You can B initiative rolls first in Mumbai with employee orientation sessions on 20 June 09 followed by a second orientation session on 2 July 09. These volunteers will now anchor JA Careers with a Purpose program for high school students. A select group of 25 students would then be mentored by 3-4 senior Barclays volunteers to help the students setup their own student company.

• New Delhi is the most recent city to resume academic calendar post summer break
• JA Careers with a Purpose and JA Success Skills classroom programs conducted for Literacy India students at their Bijwasan centre
• New volunteer debrief/orientation session conducted, on 24 May, at Genpact's Shastri Park office
• JA India engaged with HCL team for the first time with a debrief session conducted for a small group of HCL employees
• You can B initiative rolled out with employee debrief session for Barclays Delhi employees on 27 June

KEY NON-CLASSROOM EVENTS TO LOOK FOR:

• Employability Workshops for KPMG employee's children:
  • Delhi and Mumbai (18 July), Bangalore (25 July)
• JA Introductory debrief for Cognizant Bangalore employees (25 July)
• JA EMC Educators meet: Bangalore (30 July)
• JA Student Company @ Mount Carmel College, Bangalore: Organization setup. Senior industry professionals are invited to support the Student Company as mentors

JA Volunteering | Anand Vijayaraghavan

He adds, 'JA Chennai programs would not have been successful without support from regular volunteers like Karthik, Madhu, Balaji, Bhushan, Sudha, Tuhina, Reena and Narmatha. Thanks to Fredrick who has been instrumental in getting good schools which are really interested in these quality programs. My ambition is to get atleast 15% employees as volunteers for these programs from HSBC Chennai before 2009 end.'

JA Volunteering | Satyajit Nath
Microsoft volunteer takes JA programs to Guwahati

Satyajit Nath is a JA volunteer in Redmond, Washington, US where he lives with his family and works at Microsoft there. On a week-long visit to his family in Guwahati, Assam in June 2009, he contacted Venkat Matoory at the India office to enquire about local JA volunteering opportunities. Venkat quickly helped identify a course, JA Careers with a Purpose, and Satyajit identified a suitable target student group, the students of Class IX in Parijat Academy, a school for underprivileged children in the outskirts of Guwahati. Satyajit has had on-going interactions with the school as a volunteer for Asha for Education and the principal, Mr Uttam Teron, kindly helped to quickly organize the logistics for this course at short notice. The result was a condensed workshop on June 12 at the school in which 40 students attended. A factory model in the context of an incandescent light bulb was explored. The students then brainstormed the factory model for other items relevant to their life such as the ceiling fan, a bicycle, and chalk pencil for writing on blackboards, and in that context, the kinds of jobs that are necessary to enable such factory models.

After Satyajit left, Uttam reported that the students of class IX enjoyed the interaction and some of them took the advice to think hard about their careers seriously. They told their teachers that they will start a project to collectively make chalk pencil after their half yearly exam. If things go well in that project, they will also think about starting candle making. It was heartening to see that the students were able to connect their academic learning to a more "real life" application of those skills. We will keep in touch with Parijat Academy and the students of class IX as they continue this exploration of careers with a purpose. One important next step is to reinforce their awareness of careers with tools such as SEEK and VISTA to help them crystallize career choices'

Program Partnerships

Program Partnerships

HSBC Global Signature Program commenced in India with the first classroom pilots, across Mumbai and Chennai, in December 2008. Since then, the program has reached more than 1000 students across Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai -- including a one-off special pilot conducted in an after-school environment, in Hyderabad, during May 2009.

Program Partnerships

On 27 June 09, Cognizant volunteers made a successful start of Tamil JACWAP program in a rural milieu in collaboration with Everest volunteers (Kartheeban, Sadhanai and Karthikeyan).
 
Day 1 of the program was conducted for 61 CS +2 students plus 101 non-CS +2 students in Anna  Govt. Hr. Sec. School, Patteeswaram  (7 kms from Kumbakonam). All participants were tamil medium students with parents hailing from a rural background. Cognizant Foundation had helped setup a full-fledged computer lab for this school. This school takes pride in 100% +2 pass record and the Top 3 students were placed in VIT with full government scholarship.
 
Says Bala Shanmugham (with Global Workforce Management at Cognizant), 'The spontaneous feedback from students, staff and HM at the end of the program was truly heartening. Thiru Su. Kalyanasundaram, the school patron (also happens to lead the PTA for all govt schools in Tamil Nadu) was present to hear the feedback. He was very appreciative of Cognizant's initiative and impromptu presented a shawl to each of our volunteers.

We have captured the entire program and feedback on video so that we can use it to train our volunteers. Personally, it was an eye-opener when I realized that these students got the core concepts right by themselves much faster than I have seen in any urban school. With a little helping hand, they are capable of going a long way.'

Program Partnerships

"In Finland, we believe we have to invest in education, in research and in higher education. "Education can pioneer new areas for jobs. We always need new skills for the labour force - so it means that we have to keep investing." This policy received an endorsement last month from an annual report from the World Economic Forum, which identified Finland as the world's most competitive economy, citing its "culture of innovation". Read more...

Turf Talk
'Practical' life can be More than Money | An Experiment indicates so

The Context: A small time school, living by-the-day with support from well meaning Samaritans, helping educate underserved young students

What is our Chennai Program Manager's Ph.D on?
Understand the efficacy of Spiritual Intervention programs on certain psychosocial variables on drug dependent persons under treatment and rehabilitation process.
 
Read more by Fredrick, Program Manager, JA Chennai 

Albert Einstein once said 'Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind'.  The purpose of my Ph.D research is to understand the efficacy of Spiritual intervention programs on certain psychosocial variables on drug dependent persons under treatment and rehabilitation process. I followed Quasi-experimental design which required an experimental group and control group. The research involved pre-test, intervention and post-test.
 
The entire study had its foundation in wholistic concept of health, which involved quality of life, emotions, stress response, resilient factors, optimism/pessimism, social functions, and insight. All these aspects are various components of a wholistic spirituality. After the intervention, the experimental group benefited a lot and the control group remained the same.
 
Drug dependent persons themselves feel guilty about the problem.  They feel a sense of hopelessness in their life. Consequently the need is not only to counter this hopelessness and depression but also to transform the drug dependent persons. Studies have indicated that only a medical approach to the problem of drug addiction has not been successful over a long period of time. In their effort to help the drug dependent persons, family, school, communities and rehabilitation centers need to give an important role to spirituality.
 
Some ethical issues in this area may remain. For example, should health care professionals assess and use spiritual and religious factors in their practice? What if the health professional is non-spiritual or non-religious? Does such a person still have responsibility to consider the topic? Would it be unethical for any health professional, such as a health psychologist or a Professional Social Worker to assess spiritual or religious factors and use that information in planning a treatment? These are areas for future study and research. 
 
Through 27-29 April 2009 in Bangkok, Fredrick presented two papers, on addiction, to researchers and university professors at an international gathering from Asia and Latin America at Bangkok. He was invited by the International Federation of Catholic Universities. His research paper focused on 'Socio-cultural- religious meanings of addiction among the fisher people community in Chennai'.  This was quite a revelation for representatives from other countries. He also presented a paper on 'Asian perspective and response to Addiction' which focused on the steps taken by Asian countries to deal with the problem of addiction. Fredrick hopes to be awarded his doctoral degree in July or August.