JFA Evening Schools
JFA Evening Schools provide education and a nourishing meal for children in poverty-stricken situations. These schools operate in the evenings and are a much needed resource to help these children gain a better education and fight the ever-present challenge of malnutrition.
$7/month is all it takes to provide two hours of education and a healthy meal six days a week to a child at our evening schools!
2023 Update: In February of this year, we opened ten new evening schools, bringing our total to 52! We are now feeding an average of 2,000 kids per night. That’s 2,000 kids who now have the opportunity to grow up healthy, get an education, and most importantly, learn about Jesus and share Him with others.
2022 Update: Now that countries are opening up and COVID restrictions are lifting, our evening schools are back to normal operation. We have been blessed to open more schools in the spring of 2022. We now have 42 JFA evening schools, and we have a waiting list for more schools to open. In April 2022, two families were baptized in Erode, Tamil Nadu, because their children met Jesus in the evening school and shared the Gospel at home.
2020 COVID-19 Update: The schools are going strong through this pandemic. The teaching has been reduced to just a few minutes, but the feeding is ongoing and is much appreciated by the local government. The evening schools are more important now than ever since many of the families we serve were already on the edge of poverty. Many have lost a lot of work, so these schools are a lifeline for them.
Every poor child growing up in India faces two main predators:
Hunger & Lack of Education
Jesus for Asia currently has 52 evening schools operating in India, which serve an average of 2,000 children six nights a week. We estimate we have served more than a million meals since the program began in 2007! Millions of children in India do not get adequate nutrition and education, and we do all we can to help as many as possible. This story is a good reminder that we must do all we can even if we impact only a few:
A father and son were walking down the beach after a large storm had stranded thousands and thousands of starfish on the beach where they would dry out and die. The son started picking one up after another and began throwing them back into the ocean.
His father looked at him and said, “Son, you can’t throw all those starfish back into the ocean. It’s impossible! You’re not making any difference at all to these thousands of poor creatures.”
His son paused, looked at the starfish he had in his hand, and said, “Yeah, but to this one I will make all the difference in the world.”