St James Academy India History

 St.James Academy was incorporated on the 8th of April 2008 under the companies Act as a nonprofit under section 25( now section 8) of the Companies Act..  It was started by two Trustees, Dr. Vinay Samuel, founder Chairman of the Bridge Foundation, and Collin Timms, founder Chairman of the Guardian Bank. Both were Trustees of the Bridge Foundation. Collin Timms was the Managing Trustee of the Bridge Foundation. St James was given Charity status three years later and also  80G certification

  From 1978 Rev. Vinay Samuel was involved in developing self-help groups and training them in financial skills of accounting for micro-enterprises on how to price products and marketing, on how to maintain quality. These were for people with average of six years of education. They were already street vendors and micro-entrepreneurs. From this came the Bridge Foundation in 1984, one of the first microfinance organizations in the county. The Guardian Bank, one of the first micro-finance banks also came out of this process later.

St.James Academy partnered with St. James Academy in the United States based in Wisconsin USA.  Dr. Vinay Samuel was already a consultant to it  helping it develop its programs in skills training in the areas of Engineering. He had experience in this area already as in 1978 he  also developed a training center for die-making as a Divya Shanthi training Centre.

The Centre named as the Divya Shanthi Engineering Centre trained several scores of young people, some of them were also sent to Mico for further training and found jobs easily in the difficulty decades of the 70s and 80s. That is the background of St James Academy.

St. James Academy USA sent a representative to be one of the Trustees of the  St.James Academy India  and agreed to support a skills training program.

It focused on training young people in skills, that will make them employable for  the age group between 16-24-year-olds who were often school dropouts. They started studying at the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) programme of the Academy .  SJA had programs for Housekeeping, Tailoring for women, carpentry, and electrical wiremen. Those who completed received certificates  by the vocational training arm of St.James Academy and also the vocational arm of NIOS with which SJA is certified as a training Centre. These have been developed over the years from 2008. 

The problem was the young people aged 18 wanted to earn money for their family and they were  even willing to be unskilled laborers anywhere to do so and not willing to spend 6 months or 3 months  in training with no regular income to give to their families. For five years we used to pay between 3000 to 5000 INR as  stipend per month to retain students. Funds were  not available as scholarships after some time. In the end, St.James Academy started providing free training without a stipend for those who were able to take shorter courses. Today we have training programs in the following areas: tailoring and basic computers have continued while carpentry, and electrical wireman programs have been discontinued.  Tally Course was done for three years discontinued and restarted this year. Housekeeping training  was conducted for two years, elderly care training for one year, and sanitary towel making for the last three years. All programs were orientated towards income generation and finding jobs. Basic Computer training was given to all students in our high school students and those who are entering PUC courses since  the beginning of SJA. Tailoring  training was originally intended  for those wanting a job in the tailoring industry. Placements were done for at least 50% of the trainees who completed a year’s certified  course.