|
[Update: As of August 2009, ownership of GenkiJACS has moved to Genki Global, so the school is no longer an NPO. For details, see here.]
We are proud to announce that as of September 3, 2007, Genki Japanese and Culture School is a registered Non-Profit Organization (NPO)! This has been a goal of ours for some time now, so we are very excited to finally have realized that goal.
There won’t be too many big changes in the programs we provide, or the way we provide them. However, becoming an NPO will enable us to put all the revenue generated by the school back into improving and expanding our programs. It also allows you the customer to be a little more certain that we’re an institution focused on education, not profit.
Being an NPO will also enable us to expand our ties with local and national government, which helps us to provide more opportunities and better services for our students. We can expand the range and number of our homestay families, offer a wider variety of employment opportunities to students after they finish their study with us, and use some government facilities for large meetings, events, etc.
In addition, we plan to increase and formalize a program of volunteer and charity work, involving students as well as the local community. We have always given a portion of our profits to UNICEF, but our NPO status makes it easier for us to take direct action too. (We will of course continue to donate money to charity.) For example, students will be able to join beach and town clean-ups, collect money for charities (a great chance to use your Japanese skills for a good cause!), and more.
We’d like to thank the Fukuoka Prefecture NPO Center for their help in processing the application quickly. Our information will most likely be added to their site very shortly. For now, the only way we can seem to access it is by going to this page, then clicking the first checkbox (認証済, ninshouzumi, “certification complete”), entering “GenkiJACS” into the first text field, and clicking the button at the bottom of the page.
UPDATE: Comments on the site seem to have gone squiffy, but a visitor tried to leave a comment asking for our NPO registration number. It is: 2900-05-004532.