Bengaluru: Youth4Jobs (www.youth4jobs.org) is the largest organization in India which focuses on skilling and placing youth with disability. Youth 4 Jobs vision is hands-on, grass-root root transformation of PwD lives at the country level and a thought leader at the global level. It has job-linked skilling centres in 32 locations in 17 states of India and works closely with about 650 companies for placing persons with disability. Post Covid,all trainings are online. To date, Y4J has trained 23,000 youth with disabilities and placed most of them in sustainable livelihoods. The work has won prestigious national and international awards like Asia winner MIT Inclusion Innovation award. The challenging but transformational work has been captured recently in a Harvard Business case study.
Employability Skills
The Y4J’s Able+ College Connect Program aims to improve the employability skills of Graduates with Disabilities through foundation and domain skills training and subsequently place them in IT, ITES, BFSI, Retail, Logistics and other organised sectors. To achieve this, it works closely with Educational Institutions, NGO’s, Government Institutions and Corporates. The program works with several top employers such as Capgemini, Accenture, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank. In the past two years, the college connect program has placed 645 graduates across India.
The program at Bangalore aims at leveraging on the employment opportunities the city of Bangalore offers across various sectors and linking them with graduates with disabilities.
Inauguration
The program will be inaugurated on 17th August and the event will see participation from government, corporates, educational institutions. Partners for this program are JPMorgan and Social Venture Partners, Bangalore. Says Meera Shenoy, Founder-CEO, Youth4Jobs, “We are fortunate to begin our work in Bengaluru with two good partners. Bengaluru is the IT hub of the country. And we will work with industry to show hiring disabled helps business.” The event is expected to be inaugurated by the State Commissioner for PwDs, and senior leaders of Titan, Infosys, Intuit, Accenture, Fidelity. In the first year, the project will train 90 educated youth with disabilities and place 60 of them in good companies in the Information technology, ITES and banking sector.